PERLHURD(1perl)

💖 PERLHURD 💖

okay so bestie, welcome to perlhurd — that's Perl version 5 on Hurd, and yes it's giving niche but it's also giving iconic. let's get into it. 🦋

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✨ NAME ✨

perlhurd — running Perl version 5 on Hurd. that's the whole vibe. 🎀

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🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

so if you wanna use Perl on the Hurd, here's the tea: I recommend using the Debian GNU/Hurd distribution (peep https://www.debian.org/), even if an official, stable release has not yet been made. fr fr, don't come for me about the stable release thing, I said what I said.

and listen — that old gnu-0.2 binary distribution will most certainly have additional problems. like, not a vibe. skip it. 💀

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🧚 Known Problems with Perl on Hurd 🧚

okay so the Perl test suite may still report some errors on the Hurd. that's just how it is rn. 😭

the lib/anydbm and pragma/warnings tests will almost certainly fail. plot twist though: both failures are not really specific to the Hurd</>, as indicated by the test suite output. so like… not our fault bestie, the tests are just messy.

the socket tests may also fail if the network is not configured. to fix that you have to make /hurd/pfinet the translator for /servers/socket/2, giving it the right arguments. and if you need more info, try /hurd/pfinet --help — she explains herself. 🫶

and here are the statistics for Perl 5.005_62 on my system, receipts and everything:

 Failed Test  Status Wstat Total Fail  Failed  List of failed
 -----------------------------------------------------------------------
 lib/anydbm.t                 12    1   8.33%  12
 pragma/warnings             333    1   0.30%  215

 8 tests and 24 subtests skipped.
 Failed 2/229 test scripts, 99.13% okay. 2/10850 subtests failed,
     99.98% okay.

and honestly?? there are quite a few systems out there that do worse! 👑

however — and this is important — since I am running a very recent Hurd snapshot, in which a lot of bugs that were exposed by the Perl test suite have been fixed, you may encounter more failures. the likely candidates are: op/stat, lib/io_pipe, lib/io_sock, lib/io_udp and lib/time. keep an eye on those ones. 🙈

in any way, if you're seeing failures beyond those mentioned in this document, please consider upgrading to the latest Hurd before reporting the failure as a bug. do the update first, then file. the way that order matters. 💅

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🎀 AUTHOR 🎀

Mark Kettenis <kettenis@gnu.org>

Last Updated: Fri, 29 Oct 1999 22:50:30 +0200

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and that's the whole page, bestie!! this was perl v5.44.0, dated 2026-10-17, from PERLHURD(1perl). slay, go forth and Perl on Hurd responsibly 💖✨🦋