PERLPLAN9(1)

💖 perlplan9(1) — the Plan 9 tea, bestie edition 💖

Perl Programmers Reference Guide · perlplan9

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✨ NAME ✨

perlplan9 — Plan 9-specific documentation for Perl 🦋

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🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

okay so these are a few notes describing features peculiar to Plan 9 Perl. it is not meant to be a replacement for the rest of the Perl 5 documentation (which is, and I say this with love, both copious and excellent 💅). if you have any questions you can't find answers to in these man pages, contact Luther Huffman at lutherh@stratcom.com and we'll try to answer them 🫶

🎀 Invoking Perl 🎀

Perl is invoked from the command line as described in perl. most perl scripts, however, do have a first line such as #!/usr/local/bin/perl. this is known as a shebang (shell-bang) statement and it tells the OS shell where to find the perl interpreter. in Plan 9 Perl this statement should be #!/bin/perl if you wish to be able to directly invoke the script by its name. ✨

alternatively, you may invoke perl with the command Perl instead of perl. this will produce Acme-friendly error messages of the form filename:18. 👑

some scripts, usually identified with a *.PL extension, are self-configuring and are able to correctly create their own shebang path from config information located in Plan 9 Perl. these you won't need to be worried about — they got themselves, periodt. 💅

🌈 What's in Plan 9 Perl 🌈

although Plan 9 Perl currently only provides static loading, it is built with a number of useful extensions. these include Opcode, FileHandle, Fcntl, and POSIX. expect to see others (and DynaLoading!) in the future 👀

💀 What's not in Plan 9 Perl 💀

as mentioned previously, dynamic loading isn't currently available, nor is MakeMaker. both are high-priority items. fr fr.

🙈 Perl5 Functions not currently supported in Plan 9 Perl 🙈

some, such as chown and umask, aren't provided because the concept does not exist within Plan 9. others, such as some of the socket-related functions, simply haven't been written yet. many in the latter category may be supported in the future. 🌱

the functions not currently implemented include:

chown, chroot, dbmclose, dbmopen, getsockopt,
setsockopt, recvmsg, sendmsg, getnetbyname,
getnetbyaddr, getnetent, getprotoent, getservent,
sethostent, setnetent, setprotoent, setservent,
endservent, endnetent, endprotoent, umask

there may be several other functions that have undefined behavior, so this list shouldn't be considered complete 😭

🧚 Signals in Plan 9 Perl 🧚

for compatibility with perl scripts written for the Unix environment, Plan 9 Perl uses the POSIX signal emulation provided in Plan 9's ANSI POSIX Environment (APE). signal stacking isn't supported. the signals provided are:

SIGHUP, SIGINT, SIGQUIT, SIGILL, SIGABRT,
SIGFPE, SIGKILL, SIGSEGV, SIGPIPE, SIGPIPE, SIGALRM,
SIGTERM, SIGUSR1, SIGUSR2, SIGCHLD, SIGCONT,
SIGSTOP, SIGTSTP, SIGTTIN, SIGTTOU

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👑 COMPILING AND INSTALLING PERL ON PLAN 9 👑

WELCOME to Plan 9 Perl, brave soul! 🫡

this is a preliminary alpha version of Plan 9 Perl. still to be implemented are MakeMaker and DynaLoader. many perl commands are missing or currently behave in an inscrutable manner. these gaps will, with perseverance and a modicum of luck, be remedied in the near future. 😌

to install this software:

1. create the source directories and libraries for perl by running the plan9/setup.rc command (i.e., located in the plan9 subdirectory). note: the setup routine assumes that you haven't dearchived these files into /sys/src/cmd/perl. after running setup.rc you may delete the copy of the source you originally detarred, as source code has now been installed in /sys/src/cmd/perl. if you plan on installing perl binaries for all architectures, run "setup.rc -a". 🌸
2. after making sure that you have adequate privileges to build system software, from /sys/src/cmd/perl/5.00301 (adjust version appropriately) run:

mk install

if you wish to install perl versions for all architectures (68020, mips, sparc and 386) run:

mk installall

3. wait. ⏳ the build process will take a *long* time because perl bootstraps itself. a 75MHz Pentium, 16MB RAM machine takes roughly 30 minutes to build the distribution from scratch. girl. 😭

🍓 Installing Perl Documentation on Plan 9 🍓

this perl distribution comes with a tremendous amount of documentation. to add these to the built-in manuals that come with Plan 9, from /sys/src/cmd/perl/5.00301 (adjust version appropriately) run:

mk man

to begin your reading, start with:

man perl

this is a good introduction and will direct you towards other man pages that may interest you. 📚

(note: mk man may produce some extraneous noise. fear not. 🙈)

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💀 BUGS 💀

"As many as there are grains of sand on all the beaches of the world . . ." — Carl Sagan 🌊

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🎀 Revision date 🎀

this document was revised 09-October-1996 for Perl 5.003_7.

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💜 AUTHOR 💜

direct questions, comments, and the unlikely bug report (ahem) direct comments toward:

Luther Huffman, lutherh@stratcom.com, Strategic Computer Solutions, Inc.

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okay that's the whole page, bestie, you're officially a Plan 9 Perl girlie now 💅✨

this one's from perl v5.42.3, dated 2026-08-03 — love that for us 🫶