1 If you read this file _as_is_, just ignore the funny characters you
2 see. It is written in the POD format (see pod/perlpod.pod) which is
3 specially designed to be readable as is.
7 perlwin32 - Perl under Windows
11 These are instructions for building Perl under Windows 9x/NT/2000/XP
12 on the Intel x86 and Itanium architectures.
16 Before you start, you should glance through the README file
17 found in the top-level directory to which the Perl distribution
18 was extracted. Make sure you read and understand the terms under
19 which this software is being distributed.
21 Also make sure you read L<BUGS AND CAVEATS> below for the
22 known limitations of this port.
24 The INSTALL file in the perl top-level has much information that is
25 only relevant to people building Perl on Unix-like systems. In
26 particular, you can safely ignore any information that talks about
29 You may also want to look at two other options for building
30 a perl that will work on Windows NT: the README.cygwin and
31 README.os2 files, each of which give a different set of rules to
32 build a Perl that will work on Win32 platforms. Those two methods
33 will probably enable you to build a more Unix-compatible perl, but
34 you will also need to download and use various other build-time and
35 run-time support software described in those files.
37 This set of instructions is meant to describe a so-called "native"
38 port of Perl to Win32 platforms. This includes both 32-bit and
39 64-bit Windows operating systems. The resulting Perl requires no
40 additional software to run (other than what came with your operating
41 system). Currently, this port is capable of using one of the
42 following compilers on the Intel x86 architecture:
44 Borland C++ version 5.02 or later
45 Microsoft Visual C++ version 4.2 or later
46 Mingw32 with GCC version 2.95.2 or better
48 The last of these is a high quality freeware compiler. Support
49 for it is still experimental. (Older versions of GCC are known
52 This port can also be built on the Intel IA64 using:
54 Microsoft Platform SDK Nov 2001 (64-bit compiler and tools)
56 The MS Platform SDK can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/.
58 This port fully supports MakeMaker (the set of modules that
59 is used to build extensions to perl). Therefore, you should be
60 able to build and install most extensions found in the CPAN sites.
61 See L<Usage Hints for Perl on Win32> below for general hints about this.
63 =head2 Setting Up Perl on Win32
69 You need a "make" program to build the sources. If you are using
70 Visual C++ or the Platform SDK tools under Windows NT/2000/XP, nmake
71 will work. All other builds need dmake.
73 dmake is a freely available make that has very nice macro features
76 A port of dmake for Windows is available from:
78 http://www.cpan.org/authors/id/GSAR/dmake-4.1pl1-win32.zip
80 (This is a fixed version of the original dmake sources obtained from
81 http://www.wticorp.com/ As of version 4.1PL1, the original
82 sources did not build as shipped and had various other problems.
83 A patch is included in the above fixed version.)
85 Fetch and install dmake somewhere on your path (follow the instructions
86 in the README.NOW file).
88 There exists a minor coexistence problem with dmake and Borland C++
89 compilers. Namely, if a distribution has C files named with mixed
90 case letters, they will be compiled into appropriate .obj-files named
91 with all lowercase letters, and every time dmake is invoked
92 to bring files up to date, it will try to recompile such files again.
93 For example, Tk distribution has a lot of such files, resulting in
94 needless recompiles every time dmake is invoked. To avoid this, you
95 may use the script "sync_ext.pl" after a successful build. It is
96 available in the win32 subdirectory of the Perl source distribution.
100 Use the default "cmd" shell that comes with NT. Some versions of the
101 popular 4DOS/NT shell have incompatibilities that may cause you trouble.
102 If the build fails under that shell, try building again with the cmd
105 The nmake Makefile also has known incompatibilities with the
106 "command.com" shell that comes with Windows 9x. You will need to
107 use dmake and makefile.mk to build under Windows 9x.
109 The surest way to build it is on Windows NT/2000/XP, using the cmd shell.
111 Make sure the path to the build directory does not contain spaces. The
112 build usually works in this circumstance, but some tests will fail.
116 If you are using the Borland compiler, you will need dmake.
117 (The make that Borland supplies is seriously crippled and will not
118 work for MakeMaker builds.)
120 See L</"Make"> above.
122 =item Microsoft Visual C++
124 The nmake that comes with Visual C++ will suffice for building.
125 You will need to run the VCVARS32.BAT file, usually found somewhere
126 like C:\MSDEV4.2\BIN. This will set your build environment.
128 You can also use dmake to build using Visual C++; provided, however,
129 you set OSRELEASE to "microsft" (or whatever the directory name
130 under which the Visual C dmake configuration lives) in your environment
131 and edit win32/config.vc to change "make=nmake" into "make=dmake". The
132 latter step is only essential if you want to use dmake as your default
133 make for building extensions using MakeMaker.
135 =item Microsoft Platform SDK 64-bit Compiler
137 The nmake that comes with the Platform SDK will suffice for building
138 Perl. Make sure you are building within one of the "Build Environment"
139 shells available after you install the Platform SDK from the Start Menu.
141 =item MinGW32 with gcc
143 The latest release of MinGW (at the time of writing) is 2.0.0, which comes
144 with gcc-3.2, and can be downloaded here:
146 http://sourceforge.net/projects/mingw
148 Perl compiles with earlier releases of gcc (2.95 and up) that can be
149 downloaded from the same place. If you use gcc-3.2, comment out the
152 USE_GCC_V3_2 *= define
156 You also need dmake. See L</"Make"> above on how to get it.
158 =item MinGW release 1
160 The MinGW-1.1 bundle comes with gcc-2.95.3.
162 Make sure you install the binaries that work with MSVCRT.DLL as indicated
163 in the README for the GCC bundle. You may need to set up a few environment
164 variables (usually ran from a batch file).
166 There are a couple of problems with the version of gcc-2.95.2-msvcrt.exe
167 released 7 November 1999:
173 It left out a fix for certain command line quotes. To fix this, be sure
174 to download and install the file fixes/quote-fix-msvcrt.exe from the above
179 The definition of the fpos_t type in stdio.h may be wrong. If your
180 stdio.h has this problem, you will see an exception when running the
181 test t/lib/io_xs.t. To fix this, change the typedef for fpos_t from
182 "long" to "long long" in the file i386-mingw32msvc/include/stdio.h,
187 A potentially simpler to install (but probably soon-to-be-outdated) bundle
188 of the above package with the mentioned fixes already applied is available
191 http://downloads.ActiveState.com/pub/staff/gsar/gcc-2.95.2-msvcrt.zip
192 ftp://ftp.ActiveState.com/pub/staff/gsar/gcc-2.95.2-msvcrt.zip
202 Make sure you are in the "win32" subdirectory under the perl toplevel.
203 This directory contains a "Makefile" that will work with
204 versions of nmake that come with Visual C++ or the Platform SDK, and
205 a dmake "makefile.mk" that will work for all supported compilers. The
206 defaults in the dmake makefile are setup to build using Microsoft Visual
211 Edit the makefile.mk (or Makefile, if you're using nmake) and change
212 the values of INST_DRV and INST_TOP. You can also enable various
213 build flags. These are explained in the makefiles.
215 Note that it is generally not a good idea to try to build a perl with
216 INST_DRV and INST_TOP set to a path that already exists from a previous
217 build. In particular, this may cause problems with the
218 lib/ExtUtils/t/Embed.t test, which attempts to build a test program and
219 may end up building against the installed perl's lib/CORE directory rather
220 than the one being tested.
222 You will have to make sure that CCTYPE is set correctly and that
223 CCHOME points to wherever you installed your compiler.
225 The default value for CCHOME in the makefiles for Visual C++
226 may not be correct for some versions. Make sure the default exists
229 If you have either the source or a library that contains des_fcrypt(),
230 enable the appropriate option in the makefile. A ready-to-use version
231 of fcrypt.c, based on the version originally written by Eric Young at
232 ftp://ftp.funet.fi/pub/crypt/mirrors/dsi/libdes/, is bundled with the
233 distribution. Set CRYPT_SRC to fcrypt.c to use this version.
234 Alternatively, if you have built a library that contains des_fcrypt(),
235 you can set CRYPT_LIB to point to the library name.
236 Perl will also build without des_fcrypt(), but the crypt() builtin will
239 Be sure to read the instructions near the top of the makefiles carefully.
243 Type "dmake" (or "nmake" if you are using that make).
245 This should build everything. Specifically, it will create perl.exe,
246 perl59.dll at the perl toplevel, and various other extension dll's
247 under the lib\auto directory. If the build fails for any reason, make
248 sure you have done the previous steps correctly.
252 =head2 Testing Perl on Win32
254 Type "dmake test" (or "nmake test"). This will run most of the tests from
255 the testsuite (many tests will be skipped).
257 There should be no test failures when running under Windows NT/2000/XP.
258 Many tests I<will> fail under Windows 9x due to the inferior command shell.
260 Some test failures may occur if you use a command shell other than the
261 native "cmd.exe", or if you are building from a path that contains
262 spaces. So don't do that.
264 If you are running the tests from a emacs shell window, you may see
265 failures in op/stat.t. Run "dmake test-notty" in that case.
267 If you're using the Borland compiler, you may see a failure in op/taint.t
268 arising from the inability to find the Borland Runtime DLLs on the system
269 default path. You will need to copy the DLLs reported by the messages
270 from where Borland chose to install it, into the Windows system directory
271 (usually somewhere like C:\WINNT\SYSTEM32) and rerun the test.
273 If you're using Borland compiler versions 5.2 and below, you may run into
274 problems finding the correct header files when building extensions. For
275 example, building the "Tk" extension may fail because both perl and Tk
276 contain a header file called "patchlevel.h". The latest Borland compiler
277 (v5.5) is free of this misbehaviour, and it even supports an
278 option -VI- for backward (bugward) compatibility for using the old Borland
279 search algorithm to locate header files.
281 If you run the tests on a FAT partition, you may see some failures for
282 C<link()> related tests (I<op/write.t>, I<op/stat.t> ...). Testing on
283 NTFS avoids these errors.
285 Furthermore, you should make sure that during C<make test> you do not
286 have any GNU tool packages in your path: some toolkits like Unixutils
287 include some tools (C<type> for instance) which override the Windows
288 ones and makes tests fail. Remove them from your path while testing to
291 Please report any other failures as described under L<BUGS AND CAVEATS>.
293 =head2 Installation of Perl on Win32
295 Type "dmake install" (or "nmake install"). This will put the newly
296 built perl and the libraries under whatever C<INST_TOP> points to in the
297 Makefile. It will also install the pod documentation under
298 C<$INST_TOP\$VERSION\lib\pod> and HTML versions of the same under
299 C<$INST_TOP\$VERSION\lib\pod\html>. To use the Perl you just installed,
300 you will need to add two components to your PATH environment variable,
301 C<$INST_TOP\$VERSION\bin> and C<$INST_TOP\$VERSION\bin\$ARCHNAME>.
304 set PATH c:\perl\5.6.0\bin;c:\perl\5.6.0\bin\MSWin32-x86;%PATH%
306 If you opt to comment out INST_VER and INST_ARCH in the makefiles, the
307 installation structure is much simpler. In that case, it will be
308 sufficient to add a single entry to the path, for instance:
310 set PATH c:\perl\bin;%PATH%
312 =head2 Usage Hints for Perl on Win32
316 =item Environment Variables
318 The installation paths that you set during the build get compiled
319 into perl, so you don't have to do anything additional to start
320 using that perl (except add its location to your PATH variable).
322 If you put extensions in unusual places, you can set PERL5LIB
323 to a list of paths separated by semicolons where you want perl
324 to look for libraries. Look for descriptions of other environment
325 variables you can set in L<perlrun>.
327 You can also control the shell that perl uses to run system() and
328 backtick commands via PERL5SHELL. See L<perlrun>.
330 Perl does not depend on the registry, but it can look up certain default
331 values if you choose to put them there. Perl attempts to read entries from
332 C<HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Perl> and C<HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Perl>.
333 Entries in the former override entries in the latter. One or more of the
334 following entries (of type REG_SZ or REG_EXPAND_SZ) may be set:
336 lib-$] version-specific standard library path to add to @INC
337 lib standard library path to add to @INC
338 sitelib-$] version-specific site library path to add to @INC
339 sitelib site library path to add to @INC
340 vendorlib-$] version-specific vendor library path to add to @INC
341 vendorlib vendor library path to add to @INC
342 PERL* fallback for all %ENV lookups that begin with "PERL"
344 Note the C<$]> in the above is not literal. Substitute whatever version
345 of perl you want to honor that entry, e.g. C<5.6.0>. Paths must be
346 separated with semicolons, as usual on win32.
350 By default, perl handles file globbing using the File::Glob extension,
351 which provides portable globbing.
353 If you want perl to use globbing that emulates the quirks of DOS
354 filename conventions, you might want to consider using File::DosGlob
355 to override the internal glob() implementation. See L<File::DosGlob> for
358 =item Using perl from the command line
360 If you are accustomed to using perl from various command-line
361 shells found in UNIX environments, you will be less than pleased
362 with what Windows offers by way of a command shell.
364 The crucial thing to understand about the Windows environment is that
365 the command line you type in is processed twice before Perl sees it.
366 First, your command shell (usually CMD.EXE on Windows NT, and
367 COMMAND.COM on Windows 9x) preprocesses the command line, to handle
368 redirection, environment variable expansion, and location of the
369 executable to run. Then, the perl executable splits the remaining
370 command line into individual arguments, using the C runtime library
371 upon which Perl was built.
373 It is particularly important to note that neither the shell nor the C
374 runtime do any wildcard expansions of command-line arguments (so
375 wildcards need not be quoted). Also, the quoting behaviours of the
376 shell and the C runtime are rudimentary at best (and may, if you are
377 using a non-standard shell, be inconsistent). The only (useful) quote
378 character is the double quote ("). It can be used to protect spaces
379 and other special characters in arguments.
381 The Windows NT documentation has almost no description of how the
382 quoting rules are implemented, but here are some general observations
383 based on experiments: The C runtime breaks arguments at spaces and
384 passes them to programs in argc/argv. Double quotes can be used to
385 prevent arguments with spaces in them from being split up. You can
386 put a double quote in an argument by escaping it with a backslash and
387 enclosing the whole argument within double quotes. The backslash and
388 the pair of double quotes surrounding the argument will be stripped by
391 The file redirection characters "<", ">", and "|" can be quoted by
392 double quotes (although there are suggestions that this may not always
393 be true). Single quotes are not treated as quotes by the shell or
394 the C runtime, they don't get stripped by the shell (just to make
395 this type of quoting completely useless). The caret "^" has also
396 been observed to behave as a quoting character, but this appears
397 to be a shell feature, and the caret is not stripped from the command
398 line, so Perl still sees it (and the C runtime phase does not treat
399 the caret as a quote character).
401 Here are some examples of usage of the "cmd" shell:
403 This prints two doublequotes:
405 perl -e "print '\"\"' "
409 perl -e "print \"\\\"\\\"\" "
411 This prints "bar" and writes "foo" to the file "blurch":
413 perl -e "print 'foo'; print STDERR 'bar'" > blurch
415 This prints "foo" ("bar" disappears into nowhereland):
417 perl -e "print 'foo'; print STDERR 'bar'" 2> nul
419 This prints "bar" and writes "foo" into the file "blurch":
421 perl -e "print 'foo'; print STDERR 'bar'" 1> blurch
423 This pipes "foo" to the "less" pager and prints "bar" on the console:
425 perl -e "print 'foo'; print STDERR 'bar'" | less
427 This pipes "foo\nbar\n" to the less pager:
429 perl -le "print 'foo'; print STDERR 'bar'" 2>&1 | less
431 This pipes "foo" to the pager and writes "bar" in the file "blurch":
433 perl -e "print 'foo'; print STDERR 'bar'" 2> blurch | less
436 Discovering the usefulness of the "command.com" shell on Windows 9x
437 is left as an exercise to the reader :)
439 One particularly pernicious problem with the 4NT command shell for
440 Windows NT is that it (nearly) always treats a % character as indicating
441 that environment variable expansion is needed. Under this shell, it is
442 therefore important to always double any % characters which you want
443 Perl to see (for example, for hash variables), even when they are
446 =item Building Extensions
448 The Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (CPAN) offers a wealth
449 of extensions, some of which require a C compiler to build.
450 Look in http://www.cpan.org/ for more information on CPAN.
452 Note that not all of the extensions available from CPAN may work
453 in the Win32 environment; you should check the information at
454 http://testers.cpan.org/ before investing too much effort into
455 porting modules that don't readily build.
457 Most extensions (whether they require a C compiler or not) can
458 be built, tested and installed with the standard mantra:
465 where $MAKE is whatever 'make' program you have configured perl to
466 use. Use "perl -V:make" to find out what this is. Some extensions
467 may not provide a testsuite (so "$MAKE test" may not do anything or
468 fail), but most serious ones do.
470 It is important that you use a supported 'make' program, and
471 ensure Config.pm knows about it. If you don't have nmake, you can
472 either get dmake from the location mentioned earlier or get an
473 old version of nmake reportedly available from:
475 ftp://ftp.microsoft.com/Softlib/MSLFILES/nmake15.exe
477 Another option is to use the make written in Perl, available from
480 http://www.cpan.org/modules/by-module/Make/
482 You may also use dmake. See L</"Make"> above on how to get it.
484 Note that MakeMaker actually emits makefiles with different syntax
485 depending on what 'make' it thinks you are using. Therefore, it is
486 important that one of the following values appears in Config.pm:
488 make='nmake' # MakeMaker emits nmake syntax
489 make='dmake' # MakeMaker emits dmake syntax
490 any other value # MakeMaker emits generic make syntax
491 (e.g GNU make, or Perl make)
493 If the value doesn't match the 'make' program you want to use,
494 edit Config.pm to fix it.
496 If a module implements XSUBs, you will need one of the supported
497 C compilers. You must make sure you have set up the environment for
498 the compiler for command-line compilation.
500 If a module does not build for some reason, look carefully for
501 why it failed, and report problems to the module author. If
502 it looks like the extension building support is at fault, report
503 that with full details of how the build failed using the perlbug
506 =item Command-line Wildcard Expansion
508 The default command shells on DOS descendant operating systems (such
509 as they are) usually do not expand wildcard arguments supplied to
510 programs. They consider it the application's job to handle that.
511 This is commonly achieved by linking the application (in our case,
512 perl) with startup code that the C runtime libraries usually provide.
513 However, doing that results in incompatible perl versions (since the
514 behavior of the argv expansion code differs depending on the
515 compiler, and it is even buggy on some compilers). Besides, it may
516 be a source of frustration if you use such a perl binary with an
517 alternate shell that *does* expand wildcards.
519 Instead, the following solution works rather well. The nice things
520 about it are 1) you can start using it right away; 2) it is more
521 powerful, because it will do the right thing with a pattern like
522 */*/*.c; 3) you can decide whether you do/don't want to use it; and
523 4) you can extend the method to add any customizations (or even
524 entirely different kinds of wildcard expansion).
526 C:\> copy con c:\perl\lib\Wild.pm
527 # Wild.pm - emulate shell @ARGV expansion on shells that don't
530 my @g = File::DosGlob::glob($_) if /[*?]/;
535 C:\> set PERL5OPT=-MWild
536 C:\> perl -le "for (@ARGV) { print }" */*/perl*.c
540 perl5.005/win32/perlglob.c
541 perl5.005/win32/perllib.c
542 perl5.005/win32/perlglob.c
543 perl5.005/win32/perllib.c
544 perl5.005/win32/perlglob.c
545 perl5.005/win32/perllib.c
547 Note there are two distinct steps there: 1) You'll have to create
548 Wild.pm and put it in your perl lib directory. 2) You'll need to
549 set the PERL5OPT environment variable. If you want argv expansion
550 to be the default, just set PERL5OPT in your default startup
553 If you are using the Visual C compiler, you can get the C runtime's
554 command line wildcard expansion built into perl binary. The resulting
555 binary will always expand unquoted command lines, which may not be
556 what you want if you use a shell that does that for you. The expansion
557 done is also somewhat less powerful than the approach suggested above.
559 =item Win32 Specific Extensions
561 A number of extensions specific to the Win32 platform are available
562 from CPAN. You may find that many of these extensions are meant to
563 be used under the Activeware port of Perl, which used to be the only
564 native port for the Win32 platform. Since the Activeware port does not
565 have adequate support for Perl's extension building tools, these
566 extensions typically do not support those tools either and, therefore,
567 cannot be built using the generic steps shown in the previous section.
569 To ensure smooth transitioning of existing code that uses the
570 ActiveState port, there is a bundle of Win32 extensions that contains
571 all of the ActiveState extensions and most other Win32 extensions from
572 CPAN in source form, along with many added bugfixes, and with MakeMaker
573 support. This bundle is available at:
575 http://www.cpan.org/authors/id/GSAR/libwin32-0.18.zip
577 See the README in that distribution for building and installation
578 instructions. Look for later versions that may be available at the
581 =item Notes on 64-bit Windows
583 Windows .NET Server supports the LLP64 data model on the Intel Itanium
586 The LLP64 data model is different from the LP64 data model that is the
587 norm on 64-bit Unix platforms. In the former, C<int> and C<long> are
588 both 32-bit data types, while pointers are 64 bits wide. In addition,
589 there is a separate 64-bit wide integral type, C<__int64>. In contrast,
590 the LP64 data model that is pervasive on Unix platforms provides C<int>
591 as the 32-bit type, while both the C<long> type and pointers are of
592 64-bit precision. Note that both models provide for 64-bits of
595 64-bit Windows running on Itanium is capable of running 32-bit x86
596 binaries transparently. This means that you could use a 32-bit build
597 of Perl on a 64-bit system. Given this, why would one want to build
598 a 64-bit build of Perl? Here are some reasons why you would bother:
602 A 64-bit native application will run much more efficiently on
607 There is no 2GB limit on process size.
611 Perl automatically provides large file support when built under
616 Embedding Perl inside a 64-bit application.
620 =head2 Running Perl Scripts
622 Perl scripts on UNIX use the "#!" (a.k.a "shebang") line to
623 indicate to the OS that it should execute the file using perl.
624 Win32 has no comparable means to indicate arbitrary files are
627 Instead, all available methods to execute plain text files on
628 Win32 rely on the file "extension". There are three methods
629 to use this to execute perl scripts:
635 There is a facility called "file extension associations" that will
636 work in Windows NT 4.0. This can be manipulated via the two
637 commands "assoc" and "ftype" that come standard with Windows NT
638 4.0. Type "ftype /?" for a complete example of how to set this
639 up for perl scripts (Say what? You thought Windows NT wasn't
644 Since file associations don't work everywhere, and there are
645 reportedly bugs with file associations where it does work, the
646 old method of wrapping the perl script to make it look like a
647 regular batch file to the OS, may be used. The install process
648 makes available the "pl2bat.bat" script which can be used to wrap
649 perl scripts into batch files. For example:
653 will create the file "FOO.BAT". Note "pl2bat" strips any
654 .pl suffix and adds a .bat suffix to the generated file.
656 If you use the 4DOS/NT or similar command shell, note that
657 "pl2bat" uses the "%*" variable in the generated batch file to
658 refer to all the command line arguments, so you may need to make
659 sure that construct works in batch files. As of this writing,
660 4DOS/NT users will need a "ParameterChar = *" statement in their
661 4NT.INI file or will need to execute "setdos /p*" in the 4DOS/NT
662 startup file to enable this to work.
666 Using "pl2bat" has a few problems: the file name gets changed,
667 so scripts that rely on C<$0> to find what they must do may not
668 run properly; running "pl2bat" replicates the contents of the
669 original script, and so this process can be maintenance intensive
670 if the originals get updated often. A different approach that
671 avoids both problems is possible.
673 A script called "runperl.bat" is available that can be copied
674 to any filename (along with the .bat suffix). For example,
675 if you call it "foo.bat", it will run the file "foo" when it is
676 executed. Since you can run batch files on Win32 platforms simply
677 by typing the name (without the extension), this effectively
678 runs the file "foo", when you type either "foo" or "foo.bat".
679 With this method, "foo.bat" can even be in a different location
680 than the file "foo", as long as "foo" is available somewhere on
681 the PATH. If your scripts are on a filesystem that allows symbolic
682 links, you can even avoid copying "runperl.bat".
684 Here's a diversion: copy "runperl.bat" to "runperl", and type
685 "runperl". Explain the observed behavior, or lack thereof. :)
686 Hint: .gnidnats llits er'uoy fi ,"lrepnur" eteled :tniH
688 =item Miscellaneous Things
690 A full set of HTML documentation is installed, so you should be
691 able to use it if you have a web browser installed on your
694 C<perldoc> is also a useful tool for browsing information contained
695 in the documentation, especially in conjunction with a pager
696 like C<less> (recent versions of which have Win32 support). You may
697 have to set the PAGER environment variable to use a specific pager.
698 "perldoc -f foo" will print information about the perl operator
701 One common mistake when using this port with a GUI library like C<Tk>
702 is assuming that Perl's normal behavior of opening a command-line
703 window will go away. This isn't the case. If you want to start a copy
704 of C<perl> without opening a command-line window, use the C<wperl>
705 executable built during the installation process. Usage is exactly
706 the same as normal C<perl> on Win32, except that options like C<-h>
707 don't work (since they need a command-line window to print to).
709 If you find bugs in perl, you can run C<perlbug> to create a
710 bug report (you may have to send it manually if C<perlbug> cannot
711 find a mailer on your system).
715 =head1 BUGS AND CAVEATS
717 Norton AntiVirus interferes with the build process, particularly if
718 set to "AutoProtect, All Files, when Opened". Unlike large applications
719 the perl build process opens and modifies a lot of files. Having the
720 the AntiVirus scan each and every one slows build the process significantly.
721 Worse, with PERLIO=stdio the build process fails with peculiar messages
722 as the virus checker interacts badly with miniperl.exe writing configure
723 files (it seems to either catch file part written and treat it as suspicious,
724 or virus checker may have it "locked" in a way which inhibits miniperl
725 updating it). The build does complete with
729 but that may be just luck. Other AntiVirus software may have similar issues.
731 Some of the built-in functions do not act exactly as documented in
732 L<perlfunc>, and a few are not implemented at all. To avoid
733 surprises, particularly if you have had prior exposure to Perl
734 in other operating environments or if you intend to write code
735 that will be portable to other environments. See L<perlport>
736 for a reasonably definitive list of these differences.
738 Not all extensions available from CPAN may build or work properly
739 in the Win32 environment. See L</"Building Extensions">.
741 Most C<socket()> related calls are supported, but they may not
742 behave as on Unix platforms. See L<perlport> for the full list.
744 Signal handling may not behave as on Unix platforms (where it
745 doesn't exactly "behave", either :). For instance, calling C<die()>
746 or C<exit()> from signal handlers will cause an exception, since most
747 implementations of C<signal()> on Win32 are severely crippled.
748 Thus, signals may work only for simple things like setting a flag
749 variable in the handler. Using signals under this port should
750 currently be considered unsupported.
752 Please send detailed descriptions of any problems and solutions that
753 you may find to <F<perlbug@perl.com>>, along with the output produced
756 =head1 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
758 The use of a camel with the topic of Perl is a trademark
759 of O'Reilly and Associates, Inc. Used with permission.
765 =item Gary Ng E<lt>71564.1743@CompuServe.COME<gt>
767 =item Gurusamy Sarathy E<lt>gsar@activestate.comE<gt>
769 =item Nick Ing-Simmons E<lt>nick@ing-simmons.netE<gt>
773 This document is maintained by Gurusamy Sarathy.
781 This port was originally contributed by Gary Ng around 5.003_24,
782 and borrowed from the Hip Communications port that was available
783 at the time. Various people have made numerous and sundry hacks
786 Borland support was added in 5.004_01 (Gurusamy Sarathy).
788 GCC/mingw32 support was added in 5.005 (Nick Ing-Simmons).
790 Support for PERL_OBJECT was added in 5.005 (ActiveState Tool Corp).
792 Support for fork() emulation was added in 5.6 (ActiveState Tool Corp).
794 Win9x support was added in 5.6 (Benjamin Stuhl).
796 Support for 64-bit Windows added in 5.8 (ActiveState Corp).
798 Last updated: 20 April 2002