PERLUTIL(1perl)

📦
version 5.44.0 · 2 versions
, in arch rolling

💖 perlutil — the utilities that come with Perl, bestie 💖

Okay so real talk: this is the perlutil page from the Perl Programmers Reference Guide, manual section 1perl. It's basically the group chat roster for every little helper tool that shows up on your machine when Perl moves in. 🫶

🌸 NAME 🌸

perlutil — utilities packaged with the Perl distribution. Yes that's it, that's the name, we love a straightforward queen. 💅

✨ DESCRIPTION ✨

So here's the vibe: alongside the Perl interpreter itself, the Perl distribution installs a whole range of utilities on your system. 🦋

And lowkey? There are also several utilities that are used by the Perl distribution itself as part of the install process. iykyk.

This document exists to list all of these utilities, explain what they're for, and give you pointers to each module's documentation, if appropriate. It's giving ✨directory✨. Periodt.

📚 LIST OF UTILITIES 📚

🎀 Documentation 🎀

  • perldoc — the main interface to Perl's documentation. And honestly if you're reading this, you've more than likely already found it, bestie. 😭 perldoc will extract and format the documentation from any file in the current directory, any Perl module installed on the system, or any of the standard documentation pages, such as this one. Use perldoc <name> to get information on any of the utilities described in this document. Iconic behaviour, no cap.
  • pod2man
  • pod2text — okay these two are a duo. If it's run from a terminal, perldoc will usually call pod2man to translate POD (Plain Old Documentation — see perlpod for an explanation) into a manpage, and then run man to display it. If man isn't available, pod2text will be used instead and the output piped through your favourite pager. 🫶
  • pod2html — as well as those two, there's another converter on the scene: pod2html will produce HTML pages from POD. Slay.
  • pod2usage — if you just wanna know how to use the utilities described here, pod2usage will just extract the "USAGE" section. Some of the utilities will automatically call pod2usage on themselves when you call them with -help. Helpful queen fr fr. 💅
  • podchecker — if you're writing your own documentation in POD, the podchecker utility will look for errors in your markup. Writing arc, but make it validated. ✨
  • splain — splain is an interface to perldiag. Paste in your error message to it, and it'll explain it for you. It's giving therapist but for error messages. 🧚
  • roffitall — heads up bestie, the roffitall utility is not installed on your system but lives in the pod/ directory of your Perl source kit. It converts all the documentation from the distribution to *roff format, and produces a typeset PostScript or text file of the whole lot. Main character energy, honestly. 👑

🔄 Converters 🔄

  • pl2pm — to help you convert legacy programs to more modern Perl, the pl2pm utility will help you convert old-style Perl 4 libraries to new-style Perl5 modules. Glow-up assistance. 💖

🛠️ Administration 🛠️

  • libnetcfg — to display and change the libnet configuration, run the libnetcfg command. Simple as that, bestie. ✨
  • perlivp — the perlivp program is set up at Perl source code build time to test the Perl version it was built under. It can be used after running make install (or your platform's equivalent procedure) to verify that perl and its libraries have been installed correctly. It's giving vibe check for your install. 🌈

👩‍💻 Development 👩‍💻

There are a set of utilities which help you in developing Perl programs, and in particular, extending Perl with C. 😤 C is a lot, but we ball.

  • perlbug — perlbug used to be the recommended way to report bugs in the perl interpreter itself or any of the standard library modules back to the developers. But that's changed: bug reports and patches should now be submitted to https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues. Update your notes bestie, the old way is not it anymore. 💀
  • perlthanks — this program provides an easy way to send a thank-you message back to the authors and maintainers of perl. 🥹 It's just perlbug installed under another name. Same girl, different name tag. 🎀
  • h2ph — back before Perl had the XS system for connecting with C libraries, programmers used to get library constants by reading through the C header files. You may still see require 'syscall.ph' or similar around — the .ph file should be created by running h2ph on the corresponding .h file. See the h2ph documentation for more on how to convert a whole bunch of header files at once. Bulk convert, we love efficiency. 🦋
  • h2xs — h2xs converts C header files into XS modules, and will try and write as much glue between C libraries and Perl modules as it can. It's also very useful for creating skeletons of pure Perl modules. Versatile icon. 💅
  • enc2xs — enc2xs builds a Perl extension for use by Encode from either Unicode Character Mapping files (.ucm) or Tcl Encoding Files (.enc). Besides being used internally during the build process of the Encode module, you can use enc2xs to add your own encoding to perl. And the best part? No knowledge of XS is necessary. We love an accessible queen. 💖
  • xsubpp — xsubpp is a compiler to convert Perl XS code into C code. It is typically run by the makefiles created by ExtUtils::MakeMaker.

xsubpp will compile XS code into C code by embedding the constructs necessary to let C functions manipulate Perl values and creates the glue necessary to let Perl access those functions. Translating between two worlds, literally a bilingual bestie. 🫶

  • prove — prove is a command-line interface to the test-running functionality of Test::Harness. It's an alternative to make test. 🧪
  • corelist — a command-line front-end to Module::CoreList, to query what modules were shipped with given versions of perl. Detective energy, but make it modules. 🔍

🍓 General tools 🍓

A few general-purpose tools are shipped with perl, mostly because they came along with modules included in the perl distribution. They're the plus-ones of the module world. 🙈

  • encguess — encguess will attempt to guess the character encoding of files. 🔮
  • json_pp — json_pp is a pure Perl JSON converter and formatter. ✨
  • piconv — piconv is a Perl version of iconv(1), a character encoding converter widely available for various Unixen today. This script was primarily a technology demonstrator for Perl v5.8.0, but you can use piconv in the place of iconv for virtually any case. Honestly? Slay. 💅
  • ptar — ptar is a tar-like program, written in pure Perl. 🎀
  • ptardiff — ptardiff is a small utility that produces a diff between an extracted archive and an unextracted one. (Note that this utility requires the Text::Diff module to function properly; this module isn't distributed with perl, but is available from the CPAN.) Bestie, install your dependencies. 😭
  • ptargrep — ptargrep is a utility to apply pattern matching to the contents of files in a tar archive. 🕵️
  • shasum — this utility, that comes with the Digest::SHA module, is used to print or verify SHA checksums. 🧮
  • streamzip — streamzip compresses data streamed to STDIN into a streamed zip container. 🎁
  • zipdetails — zipdetails displays information about the internal record structure of the zip file. It is not concerned with displaying any details of the compressed data stored in the zip file. Structural tea only, no content gossip. 💀

📦 Installation 📦

These utilities help manage extra Perl modules that don't come with the perl distribution. Your add-on era. 🌈

  • cpan — cpan is a command-line interface to CPAN.pm. It allows you to install modules or distributions from CPAN, or just get information about them, and a lot more. It is similar to the command line mode of the CPAN module,
perl -MCPAN -e shell
  • instmodsh — a little interface to ExtUtils::Installed to examine installed modules, validate your packlists and even create a tarball from an installed module. All that? From one little shell? Obsessed. 💖

👀 SEE ALSO 👀

perldoc, pod2man, pod2text, pod2html, pod2usage, podchecker, splain, pl2pm, perlbug, h2ph, h2xs, enc2xs, xsubpp, cpan, encguess, instmodsh, json_pp, piconv, prove, corelist, ptar, ptardiff, shasum, streamzip, zipdetails

Go read them. Not all of them at once, bestie, hydrate first. 💧

And that's the whole page, periodt. 🫶 This was perlutil from perl v5.44.0, dated 2026-10-17. Manual section PERLUTIL(1perl). Stay iconic, go use perldoc when you forget something. 💅✨

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