PERLPLAN9(1perl)

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version 5.44.0 · 2 versions
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💖 PERLPLAN9 💖

okay bestie, so this is the Plan 9-specific documentation for Perl — the little corner of the Perl 5 man pages that talks about our weird and wonderful OS. Come sit with me. 🫶

✨ NAME ✨

perlplan9 — Plan 9-specific documentation for Perl. that's it, that's the page. 🎀

🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

These are a few notes describing features peculiar to Plan 9 Perl. As such, it is not intended to be a replacement for the rest of the Perl 5 documentation (which is both copious and excellent 💅). If you have any questions to which you can't find answers in these man pages, contact Luther Huffman at lutherh@stratcom.com and we'll try to answer them. fr fr, he's the plug. 📬

🦋 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. no cap, that's the one. 🔥

Alternatively, you may invoke perl with the command Perl instead of perl. This will produce Acme-friendly error messages of the form filename:18. it's giving "error messages that make sense to your editor" and honestly? iconic. ✨

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. 💆

💜 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. the way that they're just not there yet... but they're on the list, bestie. 😭

💀 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. ⚠️ (like, don't come for me if your fav isn't on the list, it might just be feral.)

🎀 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

(yes, SIGPIPE is listed twice in that list. I'm not editing the universe's inventory, I'm just reporting it. 💅)

👑 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:

let's go step by step, bestie, we're doing this together 🍓

  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
  1. 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. go make a snack. go touch grass. it'll be there when you get back. 🌸

🧚 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. 💖)

😭 BUGS 😭

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

poetic. devastating. accurate. 💀

⭐ Revision date ⭐

This document was revised 09-October-1996 for Perl 5.003_7. vintage, lowkey. 🎀

📬 AUTHOR 📬

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

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

and that's the whole page bestie!! 🥳🦋✨ slayed. go build some perl on plan 9 and think of me.

perl v5.44.0 — 2026-10-17 — PERLPLAN9(1perl) 💅🌸💖

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