3 Install - Build and Installation guide for perl5.
7 The basic steps to build and install perl5 are:
15 Each of these is explained in further detail below.
19 =head1 Start with a Fresh Distribution.
21 The results of a Configure run are stored in the config.sh file. If
22 you are upgrading from a previous version of perl, or if you change
23 systems or compilers or make other significant changes, or if you are
24 experiencing difficulties building perl, you should probably I<not>
25 re-use your old config.sh. Simply remove it or rename it, e.g.
27 mv config.sh config.sh.old
33 Configure will figure out various things about your system. Some
34 things Configure will figure out for itself, other things it will ask
35 you about. To accept the default, just press C<RETURN>. The default
38 After it runs, Configure will perform variable substitution on all the
39 F<*.SH> files and offer to run B<make depend>.
41 Configure supports a number of useful options. Run B<Configure -h>
42 to get a listing. To compile with gcc, for example, you can run
46 This is the preferred way to specify gcc (or another alternative
47 compiler) so that the hints files can set appropriate defaults.
49 If you want to use your old config.sh but override some of the items
50 with command line options, you need to use B<Configure -O>.
52 If you are willing to accept all the defaults, and you want terse
57 By default, for most systems, perl will be installed in
58 /usr/local/{bin, lib, man}. You can specify a different 'prefix' for
59 the default installation directory, when Configure prompts you or by
60 using the Configure command line option -Dprefix='/some/directory',
63 sh Configure -Dprefix=/opt/perl
65 If your prefix contains the string "perl", then the directories
66 are simplified. For example, if you use prefix=/opt/perl,
67 then Configure will suggest /opt/perl/lib instead of
68 /usr/local/lib/perl5/.
70 By default, Configure will compile perl to use dynamic loading, if
71 your system supports it. If you want to force perl to be compiled
72 statically, you can either choose this when Configure prompts you or by
73 using the Configure command line option -Uusedl.
77 By default, Configure will offer to build every extension which
78 appears to be supported. For example, Configure will offer to build
79 GDBM_File only if it is able to find the gdbm library. (See examples
80 below.) DynaLoader and Fcntl are always built by default. Configure
81 does not contain code to test for POSIX compliance, so POSIX is always
82 built by default as well. If you wish to skip POSIX, you can set the
83 Configure variable useposix=false either in a hint file or from the
84 Configure command line. Similarly, the Safe extension is always built
85 by default, but you can skip it by setting the Configure variable
86 usesafe=false either in a hint file for from the command line.
88 In summary, here are the Configure command-line variables you can set
89 to turn off each extension:
92 DynaLoader (Must always be included)
93 Fcntl (Always included by default)
98 SDBM_File (Always included by default)
102 Thus to skip the NDBM_File extension, you can use
104 sh Configure -Ui_ndbm
106 Again, this is taken care of automatically if you don't have the ndbm
109 Of course, you may always run Configure interactively and select only
110 the Extensions you want.
112 Finally, if you have dynamic loading (most modern Unix systems do)
113 remember that these extensions do not increase the size of your perl
114 executable, nor do they impact start-up time, so you probably might as
115 well build all the ones that will work on your system.
117 =head2 GNU-style configure
119 If you prefer the GNU-style B<configure> command line interface, you can
120 use the supplied B<configure> command, e.g.
124 The B<configure> script emulates several of the more common configure
131 Cross compiling is currently not supported.
133 =head2 Including locally-installed libraries
135 Perl5 comes with interfaces to number of database extensions, including
136 dbm, ndbm, gdbm, and Berkeley db. For each extension, if
137 Configure can find the appropriate header files and libraries, it will
138 automatically include that extension. The gdbm and db libraries
139 are B<not> included with perl. See the library documentation for
140 how to obtain the libraries.
142 I<Note:> If your database header (.h) files are not in a
143 directory normally searched by your C compiler, then you will need to
144 include the appropriate B<-I/your/directory> option when prompted by
145 Configure. If your database library (.a) files are not in a directory
146 normally searched by your C compiler and linker, then you will need to
147 include the appropriate B<-L/your/directory> option when prompted by
148 Configure. See the examples below.
154 =item gdbm in /usr/local.
156 Suppose you have gdbm and want Configure to find it and build the
157 GDBM_File extension. This examples assumes you have F<gdbm.h>
158 installed in F</usr/local/include/gdbm.h> and F<libgdbm.a> installed in
159 F</usr/local/lib/libgdbm.a>. Configure should figure all the
160 necessary steps out automatically.
162 Specifically, when Configure prompts you for flags for
163 your C compiler, you should include C<-I/usr/local/include>.
165 When Configure prompts you for linker flags, you should include
168 If you are using dynamic loading, then when Configure prompts you for
169 linker flags for dynamic loading, you should again include
172 Again, this should all happen automatically. If you want to accept the
173 defaults for all the questions and have Configure print out only terse
174 messages, then you can just run
178 and Configure should include the GDBM_File extension automatically.
180 This should actually work if you have gdbm installed in any of
181 (/usr/local, /opt/local, /usr/gnu, /opt/gnu, /usr/GNU, or /opt/GNU).
183 =item gdbm in /usr/you
185 Suppose you have gdbm installed in some place other than /usr/local/,
186 but you still want Configure to find it. To be specific, assume you
187 have F</usr/you/include/gdbm.h> and F</usr/you/lib/libgdbm.a>. You
188 still have to add B<-I/usr/you/include> to cc flags, but you have to take
189 an extra step to help Configure find F<libgdbm.a>. Specifically, when
190 Configure prompts you for library directories, you have to add
191 F</usr/you/lib> to the list.
193 It is possible to specify this from the command line too (all on one
197 -Dlocincpth="/usr/you/include" \
198 -Dloclibpth="/usr/you/lib"
200 C<locincpth> is a space-separated list of include directories to search.
201 Configure will automatically add the appropriate B<-I> directives.
203 C<loclibpth> is a space-separated list of library directories to search.
204 Configure will automatically add the appropriate B<-L> directives. If
205 you have some libraries under F</usr/local/> and others under
206 F</usr/you>, then you have to include both, namely
209 -Dlocincpth="/usr/you/include /usr/local/include" \
210 -Dloclibpth="/usr/you/lib /usr/local/lib"
214 =head2 Installation Directories.
216 The installation directories can all be changed by answering the
217 appropriate questions in Configure. For convenience, all the
218 installation questions are near the beginning of Configure.
220 By default, Configure uses the following directories for
221 library files (archname is a string like sun4-sunos, determined
224 /usr/local/lib/perl5/archname/5.002
225 /usr/local/lib/perl5/
226 /usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/archname
227 /usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl
229 and the following directories for manual pages:
232 /usr/local/lib/perl5/man/man3
234 (Actually, Configure recognizes the SVR3-style
235 /usr/local/man/l_man/man1 directories, if present, and uses those
236 instead.) The module man pages are stuck in that strange spot so that
237 they don't collide with other man pages stored in /usr/local/man/man3,
238 and so that Perl's man pages don't hide system man pages. On some
239 systems, B<man less> would end up calling up Perl's less.pm module man
240 page, rather than the B<less> program.
242 If you specify a prefix that contains the string "perl", then the
243 directory structure is simplified. For example, if you Configure
244 with -Dprefix=/opt/perl, then the defaults are
246 /opt/perl/lib/archname/5.002
248 /opt/perl/lib/site_perl/archname
249 /opt/perl/lib/site_perl
254 The perl executable will search the libraries in the order given
257 The directories site_perl and site_perl/archname are empty, but are
258 intended to be used for installing local or site-wide extensions. Perl
259 will automatically look in these directories. Previously, most sites
260 just put their local extensions in with the standard distribution.
262 In order to support using things like #!/usr/local/bin/perl5.002 after
263 a later version is released, architecture-dependent libraries are
264 stored in a version-specific directory, such as
265 /usr/local/lib/perl5/archname/5.002/. In 5.000 and 5.001, these files
266 were just stored in /usr/local/lib/perl5/archname/. If you will not be
267 using 5.001 binaries, you can delete the standard extensions from the
268 /usr/local/lib/perl5/archname/ directory. Locally-added extensions can
269 be moved to the site_perl and site_perl/archname directories.
271 Again, these are just the defaults, and can be changed as you run
274 =head2 Changing the installation directory
276 Configure distinguishes between the directory in which perl (and its
277 associated files) should be installed and the directory in which it
278 will eventually reside. For most sites, these two are the same; for
279 sites that use AFS, this distinction is handled automatically.
280 However, sites that use software such as B<depot> to manage software
281 packages may also wish to install perl into a different directory and
282 use that management software to move perl to its final destination.
283 This section describes how to do this. Someday, Configure may support
284 an option C<-Dinstallprefix=/foo> to simplify this.
286 Suppose you want to install perl under the F</tmp/perl5> directory.
287 You can edit F<config.sh> and change all the install* variables to
288 point to F</tmp/perl5> instead of F</usr/local/wherever>. You could
289 also set them all from the Configure command line. Or, you can
290 automate this process by placing the following lines in a file
291 F<config.over> B<before> you run Configure (replace /tmp/perl5 by a
292 directory of your choice):
294 installprefix=/tmp/perl5
295 test -d $installprefix || mkdir $installprefix
296 test -d $installprefix/bin || mkdir $installprefix/bin
297 installarchlib=`echo $installarchlib | sed "s!$prefix!$installprefix!"`
298 installbin=`echo $installbin | sed "s!$prefix!$installprefix!"`
299 installman1dir=`echo $installman1dir | sed "s!$prefix!$installprefix!"`
300 installman3dir=`echo $installman3dir | sed "s!$prefix!$installprefix!"`
301 installprivlib=`echo $installprivlib | sed "s!$prefix!$installprefix!"`
302 installscript=`echo $installscript | sed "s!$prefix!$installprefix!"`
303 installsitelib=`echo $installsitelib | sed "s!$prefix!$installprefix!"`
304 installsitearch=`echo $installsitearch | sed "s!$prefix!$installprefix!"`
306 Then, you can Configure and install in the usual way:
313 =head2 Creating an installable tar archive
315 If you need to install perl on many identical systems, it is
316 convenient to compile it once and create an archive that can be
317 installed on multiple systems. Here's one way to do that:
319 # Set up config.over to install perl into a different directory,
320 # e.g. /tmp/perl5 (see previous part).
326 tar cvf ../perl5-archive.tar .
327 # Then, on each machine where you want to install perl,
328 cd /usr/local # Or wherever you specified as $prefix
329 tar xvf perl5-archive.tar
331 =head2 What if it doesn't work?
335 =item Running Configure Interactively
337 If Configure runs into trouble, remember that you can always run
338 Configure interactively so that you can check (and correct) its
341 All the installation questions have been moved to the top, so you don't
342 have to wait for them. Once you've handled them (and your C compiler &
343 flags) you can type '&-d' at the next Configure prompt and Configure
344 will use the defaults from then on.
346 If you find yourself trying obscure command line incantations and
347 config.over tricks, I recommend you run Configure interactively
348 instead. You'll probably save yourself time in the long run.
352 The perl distribution includes a number of system-specific hints files
353 in the hints/ directory. If one of them matches your system, Configure
354 will offer to use that hint file.
356 Several of the hint files contain additional important information.
357 If you have any problems, it is a good idea to read the relevant hint
358 file for further information. See F<hints/solaris_2.sh> for an
361 =item Changing Compilers
363 If you change compilers or make other significant changes, you should
364 probably I<not> re-use your old config.sh. Simply remove it or
365 rename it, e.g. mv config.sh config.sh.old. Then rerun Configure
366 with the options you want to use.
368 This is a common source of problems. If you change from B<cc> to
369 B<gcc>, you should almost always remove your old config.sh.
371 =item Propagating your changes
373 If you later make any changes to F<config.sh>, you should propagate
374 them to all the .SH files by running B<sh Configure -S>.
378 You can also supply a shell script config.over to over-ride Configure's
379 guesses. It will get loaded up at the very end, just before config.sh
380 is created. You have to be careful with this, however, as Configure
381 does no checking that your changes make sense. See the section on
382 changing the installation directory for an example.
386 Many of the system dependencies are contained in F<config.h>.
387 F<Configure> builds F<config.h> by running the F<config_h.SH> script.
388 The values for the variables are taken from F<config.sh>.
390 If there are any problems, you can edit F<config.h> directly. Beware,
391 though, that the next time you run B<Configure>, your changes will be
396 If you have any additional changes to make to the C compiler command
397 line, they can be made in F<cflags.SH>. For instance, to turn off the
398 optimizer on F<toke.c>, find the line in the switch structure for
399 F<toke.c> and put the command C<optimize='-g'> before the C<;;>. You
400 can also edit F<cflags> directly, but beware that your changes will be
401 lost the next time you run B<Configure>.
403 To change the C flags for all the files, edit F<config.sh>
404 and change either C<$ccflags> or C<$optimize>,
405 and then re-run B<sh Configure -S ; make depend>.
409 If you don't have sh, you'll have to copy the sample file config_H to
410 config.h and edit the config.h to reflect your system's peculiarities.
411 You'll probably also have to extensively modify the extension building
418 This will look for all the includes.
419 The output is stored in F<makefile>. The only difference between
420 F<Makefile> and F<makefile> is the dependencies at the bottom of
421 F<makefile>. If you have to make any changes, you should edit
422 F<makefile>, not F<Makefile> since the Unix B<make> command reads
425 Configure will offer to do this step for you, so it isn't listed
430 This will attempt to make perl in the current directory.
432 If you can't compile successfully, try some of the following ideas.
438 If you used a hint file, try reading the comments in the hint file
439 for further tips and information.
443 If you can't compile successfully, try adding a C<-DCRIPPLED_CC> flag.
444 (Just because you get no errors doesn't mean it compiled right!)
445 This simplifies some complicated expressions for compilers that
446 get indigestion easily. If that has no effect, try turning off
447 optimization. If you have missing routines, you probably need to
448 add some library or other, or you need to undefine some feature that
449 Configure thought was there but is defective or incomplete.
453 Some compilers will not compile or optimize the larger files without
454 some extra switches to use larger jump offsets or allocate larger
455 internal tables. You can customize the switches for each file in
456 F<cflags>. It's okay to insert rules for specific files into
457 F<makefile> since a default rule only takes effect in the absence of a
462 If you can successfully build F<miniperl>, but the process crashes
463 during the building of extensions, you should run
467 to test your version of miniperl.
471 Some additional things that have been reported for either perl4 or perl5:
473 Genix may need to use libc rather than libc_s, or #undef VARARGS.
475 NCR Tower 32 (OS 2.01.01) may need -W2,-Sl,2000 and #undef MKDIR.
477 UTS may need one or more of B<-DCRIPPLED_CC>, B<-K> or B<-g>, and undef LSTAT.
479 If you get syntax errors on '(', try -DCRIPPLED_CC.
481 Machines with half-implemented dbm routines will need to #undef I_ODBM
483 SCO prior to 3.2.4 may be missing dbmclose(). An upgrade to 3.2.4
484 that includes libdbm.nfs (which includes dbmclose()) may be available.
486 If you get duplicates upon linking for malloc et al, say -DHIDEMYMALLOC.
488 If you get duplicate function definitions (a perl function has the
489 same name as another function on your system) try -DEMBED.
491 If you get varags problems with gcc, be sure that gcc is installed
492 correctly. When using gcc, you should probably have i_stdarg='define'
493 and i_varags='undef' in config.sh. The problem is usually solved
494 by running fixincludes correctly.
496 If you wish to use dynamic loading on SunOS or Solaris, and you
497 have GNU as and GNU ld installed, you may need to add B<-B/bin/> to
498 your $ccflags and $ldflags so that the system's versions of as
501 If you run into dynamic loading problems, check your setting of
502 the LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable. Perl should build
503 fine with LD_LIBRARY_PATH unset, though that may depend on details
504 of your local set-up.
506 If Configure seems to be having trouble finding library functions,
507 try not using nm extraction. You can do this from the command line
516 This will run the regression tests on the perl you just made. If it
517 doesn't say "All tests successful" then something went wrong. See the
518 file F<t/README> in the F<t> subdirectory. Note that you can't run it
519 in background if this disables opening of /dev/tty. If B<make test>
520 bombs out, just B<cd> to the F<t> directory and run B<TEST> by hand
521 to see if it makes any difference.
522 If individual tests bomb, you can run them by hand, e.g.,
526 B<NOTE>: one possible reason for errors is that some external programs
527 may be broken due to the combination of your environment and the way
528 C<make test> exercises them. This may happen for example if you have
529 one or more of these environment variables set:
530 C<LC_ALL LC_CTYPE LANG>. In certain UNIXes especially the non-English
531 locales are known to cause programs to exhibit mysterious errors.
532 If you have any of the above environment variables set, please try
533 C<setenv LC_ALL C> or <LC_ALL=C;export LC_ALL>, for C<csh>-style and
534 C<Bourne>-style shells, respectively, from the command line and then
535 retry C<make test>. If the tests then succeed, you may have a broken
536 program that is confusing the testing. Please run the troublesome test
537 by hand as shown above and see whether you can locate the program.
538 Look for things like:
539 C<exec, `backquoted command`, system, open("|...")> or C<open("...|")>.
540 All these mean that Perl is trying to run some external program.
541 =head1 INSTALLING PERL5
545 This will put perl into the public directory you specified to
546 B<Configure>; by default this is F</usr/local/bin>. It will also try
547 to put the man pages in a reasonable place. It will not nroff the man
548 page, however. You may need to be root to run B<make install>. If you
549 are not root, you must own the directories in question and you should
550 ignore any messages about chown not working.
552 B<Note:> In the 5.002 release, you will see some harmless error
553 messages and warnings from pod2man. You may safely ignore them. (Yes,
554 they should be fixed, but they didn't seem important enough to warrant
555 holding up the entire 5.002 release.)
557 If you want to see exactly what will happen without installing
558 anything, you can run
560 ./perl installperl -n
563 B<make install> will install the following:
566 perl5.nnn where nnn is the current release number. This
567 will be a link to perl.
569 sperl5.nnn If you requested setuid emulation.
570 a2p awk-to-perl translator
571 cppstdin This is used by perl -P, if your cc -E can't
573 c2ph, pstruct Scripts for handling C structures in header files.
574 s2p sed-to-perl translator
575 find2perl find-to-perl translator
576 h2xs Converts C .h header files to Perl extensions.
577 perlbug Tool to report bugs in Perl.
578 perldoc Tool to read perl's pod documentation.
579 pod2html, Converters from perl's pod documentation format
580 pod2latex, and to other useful formats.
583 library files in $privlib and $archlib specified to
584 Configure, usually under /usr/local/lib/perl5/.
585 man pages in the location specified to Configure, usually
586 something like /usr/local/man/man1.
587 module in the location specified to Configure, usually
588 man pages under /usr/local/lib/perl5/man/man3.
589 pod/*.pod in $privlib/pod/.
591 Installperl will also create the library directories $siteperl and
592 $sitearch listed in config.sh. Usually, these are something like
593 /usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/
594 /usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/$archname
595 where $archname is something like sun4-sunos. These directories
596 will be used for installing extensions.
598 Perl's *.h header files and the libperl.a library are also
599 installed under $archlib so that any user may later build new
600 extensions even if the Perl source is no longer available.
602 The libperl.a library is only needed for building new
603 extensions and linking them statically into a new perl executable.
604 If you will not be doing that, then you may safely delete
605 $archlib/libperl.a after perl is installed.
607 make install may also offer to install perl in a "standard" location.
609 Most of the documentation in the pod/ directory is also available
610 in HTML and LaTeX format. Type
612 cd pod; make html; cd ..
614 to generate the html versions, and
616 cd pod; make tex; cd ..
618 to generate the LaTeX versions.
620 =head1 Coexistence with earlier versions of perl5.
622 You can safely install the current version of perl5 and still run
623 scripts under the old binaries. Instead of starting your script with
624 #!/usr/local/bin/perl, just start it with #!/usr/local/bin/perl5.001
625 (or whatever version you want to run.)
627 The architecture-dependent files are stored in a version-specific
628 directory (such as F</usr/local/lib/perl5/sun4-sunos/5.002>) so that
629 they are still accessible. I<Note:> perl5.000 and perl5.001 did not
630 put their architecture-dependent libraries in a version-specific
631 directory. They are simply in F</usr/local/lib/perl5/$archname>. If
632 you will not be using 5.000 or 5.001, you may safely remove those
635 The standard library files in F</usr/local/lib/perl5>
636 should be useable by all versions of perl5.
638 Most extensions will probably not need to be recompiled to use with a newer
639 version of perl. If you do run into problems, and you want to continue
640 to use the old version of perl along with your extension, simply move
641 those extension files to the appropriate version directory, such as
642 F</usr/local/lib/perl/archname/5.002>. Then perl5.002 will find your
643 files in the 5.002 directory, and newer versions of perl will find your
644 newer extension in the site_perl directory.
646 Some users may prefer to keep all versions of perl in completely
647 separate directories. One convenient way to do this is by
648 using a separate prefix for each version, such as
650 sh Configure -Dprefix=/opt/perl5.002
652 and adding /opt/perl5.002/bin to the shell PATH variable. Such users
653 may also wish to add a symbolic link /usr/local/bin/perl so that
654 scripts can still start with #!/usr/local/bin/perl.
656 =head1 Coexistence with perl4
658 You can safely install perl5 even if you want to keep perl4 around.
660 By default, the perl5 libraries go into F</usr/local/lib/perl5/>, so
661 they don't override the perl4 libraries in F</usr/local/lib/perl/>.
663 In your /usr/local/bin directory, you should have a binary named
664 F<perl4.036>. That will not be touched by the perl5 installation
665 process. Most perl4 scripts should run just fine under perl5.
666 However, if you have any scripts that require perl4, you can replace
667 the C<#!> line at the top of them by C<#!/usr/local/bin/perl4.036>
668 (or whatever the appropriate pathname is).
672 Read the manual entries before running perl. The main documentation is
673 in the pod/ subdirectory and should have been installed during the
674 build process. Type B<man perl> to get started. Alternatively, you
675 can type B<perldoc perl> to use the supplied B<perldoc> script. This
676 is sometimes useful for finding things in the library modules.
680 Andy Dougherty <doughera@lafcol.lafayette.edu>, borrowing I<very> heavily
681 from the original README by Larry Wall.