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 MinGW with gcc gcc version 2.95.2 or later
48 The last of these is a high quality freeware compiler. Use version
49 3.2.x or later for the best results with this compiler.
51 This port can also be built on the Intel IA64 using:
53 Microsoft Platform SDK Nov 2001 (64-bit compiler and tools)
55 The MS Platform SDK can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/.
57 This port fully supports MakeMaker (the set of modules that
58 is used to build extensions to perl). Therefore, you should be
59 able to build and install most extensions found in the CPAN sites.
60 See L<Usage Hints for Perl on Win32> below for general hints about this.
62 =head2 Setting Up Perl on Win32
68 You need a "make" program to build the sources. If you are using
69 Visual C++ or the Platform SDK tools under Windows NT/2000/XP, nmake
70 will work. All other builds need dmake.
72 dmake is a freely available make that has very nice macro features
75 A port of dmake for Windows is available from:
77 http://www.cpan.org/authors/id/GSAR/dmake-4.1pl1-win32.zip
79 (This is a fixed version of the original dmake sources obtained from
80 http://www.wticorp.com/ As of version 4.1PL1, the original
81 sources did not build as shipped and had various other problems.
82 A patch is included in the above fixed version.)
84 Fetch and install dmake somewhere on your path (follow the instructions
85 in the README.NOW file).
87 There exists a minor coexistence problem with dmake and Borland C++
88 compilers. Namely, if a distribution has C files named with mixed
89 case letters, they will be compiled into appropriate .obj-files named
90 with all lowercase letters, and every time dmake is invoked
91 to bring files up to date, it will try to recompile such files again.
92 For example, Tk distribution has a lot of such files, resulting in
93 needless recompiles every time dmake is invoked. To avoid this, you
94 may use the script "sync_ext.pl" after a successful build. It is
95 available in the win32 subdirectory of the Perl source distribution.
99 Use the default "cmd" shell that comes with NT. Some versions of the
100 popular 4DOS/NT shell have incompatibilities that may cause you trouble.
101 If the build fails under that shell, try building again with the cmd
104 The nmake Makefile also has known incompatibilities with the
105 "command.com" shell that comes with Windows 9x. You will need to
106 use dmake and makefile.mk to build under Windows 9x.
108 The surest way to build it is on Windows NT/2000/XP, using the cmd shell.
110 Make sure the path to the build directory does not contain spaces. The
111 build usually works in this circumstance, but some tests will fail.
115 If you are using the Borland compiler, you will need dmake.
116 (The make that Borland supplies is seriously crippled and will not
117 work for MakeMaker builds.)
119 See L</"Make"> above.
121 =item Microsoft Visual C++
123 The nmake that comes with Visual C++ will suffice for building.
124 You will need to run the VCVARS32.BAT file, usually found somewhere
125 like C:\MSDEV4.2\BIN. This will set your build environment.
127 You can also use dmake to build using Visual C++; provided, however,
128 you set OSRELEASE to "microsft" (or whatever the directory name
129 under which the Visual C dmake configuration lives) in your environment
130 and edit win32/config.vc to change "make=nmake" into "make=dmake". The
131 latter step is only essential if you want to use dmake as your default
132 make for building extensions using MakeMaker.
134 =item Microsoft Platform SDK 64-bit Compiler
136 The nmake that comes with the Platform SDK will suffice for building
137 Perl. Make sure you are building within one of the "Build Environment"
138 shells available after you install the Platform SDK from the Start Menu.
140 =item MinGW release 3 with gcc
142 The latest release of MinGW at the time of writing is 3.1.0, which comes
143 with gcc-3.2.3, and can be downloaded here:
145 http://www.mingw.org/
147 Perl also compiles with earlier releases of gcc (2.95.2 and up). See below
148 for notes about using earlier versions of MinGW/gcc.
150 You also need dmake. See L</"Make"> above on how to get it.
152 =item MinGW release 1 with gcc
154 The MinGW-1.1 bundle comes with gcc-2.95.3.
156 Make sure you install the binaries that work with MSVCRT.DLL as indicated
157 in the README for the GCC bundle. You may need to set up a few environment
158 variables (usually ran from a batch file).
160 There are a couple of problems with the version of gcc-2.95.2-msvcrt.exe
161 released 7 November 1999:
167 It left out a fix for certain command line quotes. To fix this, be sure
168 to download and install the file fixes/quote-fix-msvcrt.exe from the above
173 The definition of the fpos_t type in stdio.h may be wrong. If your
174 stdio.h has this problem, you will see an exception when running the
175 test t/lib/io_xs.t. To fix this, change the typedef for fpos_t from
176 "long" to "long long" in the file i386-mingw32msvc/include/stdio.h,
181 A potentially simpler to install (but probably soon-to-be-outdated) bundle
182 of the above package with the mentioned fixes already applied is available
185 http://downloads.ActiveState.com/pub/staff/gsar/gcc-2.95.2-msvcrt.zip
186 ftp://ftp.ActiveState.com/pub/staff/gsar/gcc-2.95.2-msvcrt.zip
196 Make sure you are in the "win32" subdirectory under the perl toplevel.
197 This directory contains a "Makefile" that will work with
198 versions of nmake that come with Visual C++ or the Platform SDK, and
199 a dmake "makefile.mk" that will work for all supported compilers. The
200 defaults in the dmake makefile are setup to build using Microsoft Visual
205 Edit the makefile.mk (or Makefile, if you're using nmake) and change
206 the values of INST_DRV and INST_TOP. You can also enable various
207 build flags. These are explained in the makefiles.
209 Note that it is generally not a good idea to try to build a perl with
210 INST_DRV and INST_TOP set to a path that already exists from a previous
211 build. In particular, this may cause problems with the
212 lib/ExtUtils/t/Embed.t test, which attempts to build a test program and
213 may end up building against the installed perl's lib/CORE directory rather
214 than the one being tested.
216 You will have to make sure that CCTYPE is set correctly and that
217 CCHOME points to wherever you installed your compiler.
219 The default value for CCHOME in the makefiles for Visual C++
220 may not be correct for some versions. Make sure the default exists
223 If you have either the source or a library that contains des_fcrypt(),
224 enable the appropriate option in the makefile. A ready-to-use version
225 of fcrypt.c, based on the version originally written by Eric Young at
226 ftp://ftp.funet.fi/pub/crypt/mirrors/dsi/libdes/, is bundled with the
227 distribution. Set CRYPT_SRC to fcrypt.c to use this version.
228 Alternatively, if you have built a library that contains des_fcrypt(),
229 you can set CRYPT_LIB to point to the library name.
230 Perl will also build without des_fcrypt(), but the crypt() builtin will
233 Be sure to read the instructions near the top of the makefiles carefully.
237 Type "dmake" (or "nmake" if you are using that make).
239 This should build everything. Specifically, it will create perl.exe,
240 perl59.dll at the perl toplevel, and various other extension dll's
241 under the lib\auto directory. If the build fails for any reason, make
242 sure you have done the previous steps correctly.
246 =head2 Testing Perl on Win32
248 Type "dmake test" (or "nmake test"). This will run most of the tests from
249 the testsuite (many tests will be skipped).
251 There should be no test failures when running under Windows NT/2000/XP.
252 Many tests I<will> fail under Windows 9x due to the inferior command shell.
254 Some test failures may occur if you use a command shell other than the
255 native "cmd.exe", or if you are building from a path that contains
256 spaces. So don't do that.
258 If you are running the tests from a emacs shell window, you may see
259 failures in op/stat.t. Run "dmake test-notty" in that case.
261 If you're using the Borland compiler, you may see a failure in op/taint.t
262 arising from the inability to find the Borland Runtime DLLs on the system
263 default path. You will need to copy the DLLs reported by the messages
264 from where Borland chose to install it, into the Windows system directory
265 (usually somewhere like C:\WINNT\SYSTEM32) and rerun the test.
267 If you're using Borland compiler versions 5.2 and below, you may run into
268 problems finding the correct header files when building extensions. For
269 example, building the "Tk" extension may fail because both perl and Tk
270 contain a header file called "patchlevel.h". The latest Borland compiler
271 (v5.5) is free of this misbehaviour, and it even supports an
272 option -VI- for backward (bugward) compatibility for using the old Borland
273 search algorithm to locate header files.
275 If you run the tests on a FAT partition, you may see some failures for
276 C<link()> related tests (I<op/write.t>, I<op/stat.t> ...). Testing on
277 NTFS avoids these errors.
279 Furthermore, you should make sure that during C<make test> you do not
280 have any GNU tool packages in your path: some toolkits like Unixutils
281 include some tools (C<type> for instance) which override the Windows
282 ones and makes tests fail. Remove them from your path while testing to
285 Please report any other failures as described under L<BUGS AND CAVEATS>.
287 =head2 Installation of Perl on Win32
289 Type "dmake install" (or "nmake install"). This will put the newly
290 built perl and the libraries under whatever C<INST_TOP> points to in the
291 Makefile. It will also install the pod documentation under
292 C<$INST_TOP\$VERSION\lib\pod> and HTML versions of the same under
293 C<$INST_TOP\$VERSION\lib\pod\html>. To use the Perl you just installed,
294 you will need to add two components to your PATH environment variable,
295 C<$INST_TOP\$VERSION\bin> and C<$INST_TOP\$VERSION\bin\$ARCHNAME>.
298 set PATH c:\perl\5.6.0\bin;c:\perl\5.6.0\bin\MSWin32-x86;%PATH%
300 If you opt to comment out INST_VER and INST_ARCH in the makefiles, the
301 installation structure is much simpler. In that case, it will be
302 sufficient to add a single entry to the path, for instance:
304 set PATH c:\perl\bin;%PATH%
306 =head2 Usage Hints for Perl on Win32
310 =item Environment Variables
312 The installation paths that you set during the build get compiled
313 into perl, so you don't have to do anything additional to start
314 using that perl (except add its location to your PATH variable).
316 If you put extensions in unusual places, you can set PERL5LIB
317 to a list of paths separated by semicolons where you want perl
318 to look for libraries. Look for descriptions of other environment
319 variables you can set in L<perlrun>.
321 You can also control the shell that perl uses to run system() and
322 backtick commands via PERL5SHELL. See L<perlrun>.
324 Perl does not depend on the registry, but it can look up certain default
325 values if you choose to put them there. Perl attempts to read entries from
326 C<HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Perl> and C<HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Perl>.
327 Entries in the former override entries in the latter. One or more of the
328 following entries (of type REG_SZ or REG_EXPAND_SZ) may be set:
330 lib-$] version-specific standard library path to add to @INC
331 lib standard library path to add to @INC
332 sitelib-$] version-specific site library path to add to @INC
333 sitelib site library path to add to @INC
334 vendorlib-$] version-specific vendor library path to add to @INC
335 vendorlib vendor library path to add to @INC
336 PERL* fallback for all %ENV lookups that begin with "PERL"
338 Note the C<$]> in the above is not literal. Substitute whatever version
339 of perl you want to honor that entry, e.g. C<5.6.0>. Paths must be
340 separated with semicolons, as usual on win32.
344 By default, perl handles file globbing using the File::Glob extension,
345 which provides portable globbing.
347 If you want perl to use globbing that emulates the quirks of DOS
348 filename conventions, you might want to consider using File::DosGlob
349 to override the internal glob() implementation. See L<File::DosGlob> for
352 =item Using perl from the command line
354 If you are accustomed to using perl from various command-line
355 shells found in UNIX environments, you will be less than pleased
356 with what Windows offers by way of a command shell.
358 The crucial thing to understand about the Windows environment is that
359 the command line you type in is processed twice before Perl sees it.
360 First, your command shell (usually CMD.EXE on Windows NT, and
361 COMMAND.COM on Windows 9x) preprocesses the command line, to handle
362 redirection, environment variable expansion, and location of the
363 executable to run. Then, the perl executable splits the remaining
364 command line into individual arguments, using the C runtime library
365 upon which Perl was built.
367 It is particularly important to note that neither the shell nor the C
368 runtime do any wildcard expansions of command-line arguments (so
369 wildcards need not be quoted). Also, the quoting behaviours of the
370 shell and the C runtime are rudimentary at best (and may, if you are
371 using a non-standard shell, be inconsistent). The only (useful) quote
372 character is the double quote ("). It can be used to protect spaces
373 and other special characters in arguments.
375 The Windows NT documentation has almost no description of how the
376 quoting rules are implemented, but here are some general observations
377 based on experiments: The C runtime breaks arguments at spaces and
378 passes them to programs in argc/argv. Double quotes can be used to
379 prevent arguments with spaces in them from being split up. You can
380 put a double quote in an argument by escaping it with a backslash and
381 enclosing the whole argument within double quotes. The backslash and
382 the pair of double quotes surrounding the argument will be stripped by
385 The file redirection characters "<", ">", and "|" can be quoted by
386 double quotes (although there are suggestions that this may not always
387 be true). Single quotes are not treated as quotes by the shell or
388 the C runtime, they don't get stripped by the shell (just to make
389 this type of quoting completely useless). The caret "^" has also
390 been observed to behave as a quoting character, but this appears
391 to be a shell feature, and the caret is not stripped from the command
392 line, so Perl still sees it (and the C runtime phase does not treat
393 the caret as a quote character).
395 Here are some examples of usage of the "cmd" shell:
397 This prints two doublequotes:
399 perl -e "print '\"\"' "
403 perl -e "print \"\\\"\\\"\" "
405 This prints "bar" and writes "foo" to the file "blurch":
407 perl -e "print 'foo'; print STDERR 'bar'" > blurch
409 This prints "foo" ("bar" disappears into nowhereland):
411 perl -e "print 'foo'; print STDERR 'bar'" 2> nul
413 This prints "bar" and writes "foo" into the file "blurch":
415 perl -e "print 'foo'; print STDERR 'bar'" 1> blurch
417 This pipes "foo" to the "less" pager and prints "bar" on the console:
419 perl -e "print 'foo'; print STDERR 'bar'" | less
421 This pipes "foo\nbar\n" to the less pager:
423 perl -le "print 'foo'; print STDERR 'bar'" 2>&1 | less
425 This pipes "foo" to the pager and writes "bar" in the file "blurch":
427 perl -e "print 'foo'; print STDERR 'bar'" 2> blurch | less
430 Discovering the usefulness of the "command.com" shell on Windows 9x
431 is left as an exercise to the reader :)
433 One particularly pernicious problem with the 4NT command shell for
434 Windows NT is that it (nearly) always treats a % character as indicating
435 that environment variable expansion is needed. Under this shell, it is
436 therefore important to always double any % characters which you want
437 Perl to see (for example, for hash variables), even when they are
440 =item Building Extensions
442 The Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (CPAN) offers a wealth
443 of extensions, some of which require a C compiler to build.
444 Look in http://www.cpan.org/ for more information on CPAN.
446 Note that not all of the extensions available from CPAN may work
447 in the Win32 environment; you should check the information at
448 http://testers.cpan.org/ before investing too much effort into
449 porting modules that don't readily build.
451 Most extensions (whether they require a C compiler or not) can
452 be built, tested and installed with the standard mantra:
459 where $MAKE is whatever 'make' program you have configured perl to
460 use. Use "perl -V:make" to find out what this is. Some extensions
461 may not provide a testsuite (so "$MAKE test" may not do anything or
462 fail), but most serious ones do.
464 It is important that you use a supported 'make' program, and
465 ensure Config.pm knows about it. If you don't have nmake, you can
466 either get dmake from the location mentioned earlier or get an
467 old version of nmake reportedly available from:
469 http://download.microsoft.com/download/vc15/Patch/1.52/W95/EN-US/nmake15.exe
471 Another option is to use the make written in Perl, available from
474 http://www.cpan.org/modules/by-module/Make/
476 You may also use dmake. See L</"Make"> above on how to get it.
478 Note that MakeMaker actually emits makefiles with different syntax
479 depending on what 'make' it thinks you are using. Therefore, it is
480 important that one of the following values appears in Config.pm:
482 make='nmake' # MakeMaker emits nmake syntax
483 make='dmake' # MakeMaker emits dmake syntax
484 any other value # MakeMaker emits generic make syntax
485 (e.g GNU make, or Perl make)
487 If the value doesn't match the 'make' program you want to use,
488 edit Config.pm to fix it.
490 If a module implements XSUBs, you will need one of the supported
491 C compilers. You must make sure you have set up the environment for
492 the compiler for command-line compilation.
494 If a module does not build for some reason, look carefully for
495 why it failed, and report problems to the module author. If
496 it looks like the extension building support is at fault, report
497 that with full details of how the build failed using the perlbug
500 =item Command-line Wildcard Expansion
502 The default command shells on DOS descendant operating systems (such
503 as they are) usually do not expand wildcard arguments supplied to
504 programs. They consider it the application's job to handle that.
505 This is commonly achieved by linking the application (in our case,
506 perl) with startup code that the C runtime libraries usually provide.
507 However, doing that results in incompatible perl versions (since the
508 behavior of the argv expansion code differs depending on the
509 compiler, and it is even buggy on some compilers). Besides, it may
510 be a source of frustration if you use such a perl binary with an
511 alternate shell that *does* expand wildcards.
513 Instead, the following solution works rather well. The nice things
514 about it are 1) you can start using it right away; 2) it is more
515 powerful, because it will do the right thing with a pattern like
516 */*/*.c; 3) you can decide whether you do/don't want to use it; and
517 4) you can extend the method to add any customizations (or even
518 entirely different kinds of wildcard expansion).
520 C:\> copy con c:\perl\lib\Wild.pm
521 # Wild.pm - emulate shell @ARGV expansion on shells that don't
524 my @g = File::DosGlob::glob($_) if /[*?]/;
529 C:\> set PERL5OPT=-MWild
530 C:\> perl -le "for (@ARGV) { print }" */*/perl*.c
534 perl5.005/win32/perlglob.c
535 perl5.005/win32/perllib.c
536 perl5.005/win32/perlglob.c
537 perl5.005/win32/perllib.c
538 perl5.005/win32/perlglob.c
539 perl5.005/win32/perllib.c
541 Note there are two distinct steps there: 1) You'll have to create
542 Wild.pm and put it in your perl lib directory. 2) You'll need to
543 set the PERL5OPT environment variable. If you want argv expansion
544 to be the default, just set PERL5OPT in your default startup
547 If you are using the Visual C compiler, you can get the C runtime's
548 command line wildcard expansion built into perl binary. The resulting
549 binary will always expand unquoted command lines, which may not be
550 what you want if you use a shell that does that for you. The expansion
551 done is also somewhat less powerful than the approach suggested above.
553 =item Win32 Specific Extensions
555 A number of extensions specific to the Win32 platform are available
556 from CPAN. You may find that many of these extensions are meant to
557 be used under the Activeware port of Perl, which used to be the only
558 native port for the Win32 platform. Since the Activeware port does not
559 have adequate support for Perl's extension building tools, these
560 extensions typically do not support those tools either and, therefore,
561 cannot be built using the generic steps shown in the previous section.
563 To ensure smooth transitioning of existing code that uses the
564 ActiveState port, there is a bundle of Win32 extensions that contains
565 all of the ActiveState extensions and most other Win32 extensions from
566 CPAN in source form, along with many added bugfixes, and with MakeMaker
567 support. This bundle is available at:
569 http://www.cpan.org/authors/id/GSAR/libwin32-0.18.zip
571 See the README in that distribution for building and installation
572 instructions. Look for later versions that may be available at the
575 =item Notes on 64-bit Windows
577 Windows .NET Server supports the LLP64 data model on the Intel Itanium
580 The LLP64 data model is different from the LP64 data model that is the
581 norm on 64-bit Unix platforms. In the former, C<int> and C<long> are
582 both 32-bit data types, while pointers are 64 bits wide. In addition,
583 there is a separate 64-bit wide integral type, C<__int64>. In contrast,
584 the LP64 data model that is pervasive on Unix platforms provides C<int>
585 as the 32-bit type, while both the C<long> type and pointers are of
586 64-bit precision. Note that both models provide for 64-bits of
589 64-bit Windows running on Itanium is capable of running 32-bit x86
590 binaries transparently. This means that you could use a 32-bit build
591 of Perl on a 64-bit system. Given this, why would one want to build
592 a 64-bit build of Perl? Here are some reasons why you would bother:
596 A 64-bit native application will run much more efficiently on
601 There is no 2GB limit on process size.
605 Perl automatically provides large file support when built under
610 Embedding Perl inside a 64-bit application.
614 =head2 Running Perl Scripts
616 Perl scripts on UNIX use the "#!" (a.k.a "shebang") line to
617 indicate to the OS that it should execute the file using perl.
618 Win32 has no comparable means to indicate arbitrary files are
621 Instead, all available methods to execute plain text files on
622 Win32 rely on the file "extension". There are three methods
623 to use this to execute perl scripts:
629 There is a facility called "file extension associations" that will
630 work in Windows NT 4.0. This can be manipulated via the two
631 commands "assoc" and "ftype" that come standard with Windows NT
632 4.0. Type "ftype /?" for a complete example of how to set this
633 up for perl scripts (Say what? You thought Windows NT wasn't
638 Since file associations don't work everywhere, and there are
639 reportedly bugs with file associations where it does work, the
640 old method of wrapping the perl script to make it look like a
641 regular batch file to the OS, may be used. The install process
642 makes available the "pl2bat.bat" script which can be used to wrap
643 perl scripts into batch files. For example:
647 will create the file "FOO.BAT". Note "pl2bat" strips any
648 .pl suffix and adds a .bat suffix to the generated file.
650 If you use the 4DOS/NT or similar command shell, note that
651 "pl2bat" uses the "%*" variable in the generated batch file to
652 refer to all the command line arguments, so you may need to make
653 sure that construct works in batch files. As of this writing,
654 4DOS/NT users will need a "ParameterChar = *" statement in their
655 4NT.INI file or will need to execute "setdos /p*" in the 4DOS/NT
656 startup file to enable this to work.
660 Using "pl2bat" has a few problems: the file name gets changed,
661 so scripts that rely on C<$0> to find what they must do may not
662 run properly; running "pl2bat" replicates the contents of the
663 original script, and so this process can be maintenance intensive
664 if the originals get updated often. A different approach that
665 avoids both problems is possible.
667 A script called "runperl.bat" is available that can be copied
668 to any filename (along with the .bat suffix). For example,
669 if you call it "foo.bat", it will run the file "foo" when it is
670 executed. Since you can run batch files on Win32 platforms simply
671 by typing the name (without the extension), this effectively
672 runs the file "foo", when you type either "foo" or "foo.bat".
673 With this method, "foo.bat" can even be in a different location
674 than the file "foo", as long as "foo" is available somewhere on
675 the PATH. If your scripts are on a filesystem that allows symbolic
676 links, you can even avoid copying "runperl.bat".
678 Here's a diversion: copy "runperl.bat" to "runperl", and type
679 "runperl". Explain the observed behavior, or lack thereof. :)
680 Hint: .gnidnats llits er'uoy fi ,"lrepnur" eteled :tniH
682 =item Miscellaneous Things
684 A full set of HTML documentation is installed, so you should be
685 able to use it if you have a web browser installed on your
688 C<perldoc> is also a useful tool for browsing information contained
689 in the documentation, especially in conjunction with a pager
690 like C<less> (recent versions of which have Win32 support). You may
691 have to set the PAGER environment variable to use a specific pager.
692 "perldoc -f foo" will print information about the perl operator
695 One common mistake when using this port with a GUI library like C<Tk>
696 is assuming that Perl's normal behavior of opening a command-line
697 window will go away. This isn't the case. If you want to start a copy
698 of C<perl> without opening a command-line window, use the C<wperl>
699 executable built during the installation process. Usage is exactly
700 the same as normal C<perl> on Win32, except that options like C<-h>
701 don't work (since they need a command-line window to print to).
703 If you find bugs in perl, you can run C<perlbug> to create a
704 bug report (you may have to send it manually if C<perlbug> cannot
705 find a mailer on your system).
709 =head1 BUGS AND CAVEATS
711 Norton AntiVirus interferes with the build process, particularly if
712 set to "AutoProtect, All Files, when Opened". Unlike large applications
713 the perl build process opens and modifies a lot of files. Having the
714 the AntiVirus scan each and every one slows build the process significantly.
715 Worse, with PERLIO=stdio the build process fails with peculiar messages
716 as the virus checker interacts badly with miniperl.exe writing configure
717 files (it seems to either catch file part written and treat it as suspicious,
718 or virus checker may have it "locked" in a way which inhibits miniperl
719 updating it). The build does complete with
723 but that may be just luck. Other AntiVirus software may have similar issues.
725 Some of the built-in functions do not act exactly as documented in
726 L<perlfunc>, and a few are not implemented at all. To avoid
727 surprises, particularly if you have had prior exposure to Perl
728 in other operating environments or if you intend to write code
729 that will be portable to other environments. See L<perlport>
730 for a reasonably definitive list of these differences.
732 Not all extensions available from CPAN may build or work properly
733 in the Win32 environment. See L</"Building Extensions">.
735 Most C<socket()> related calls are supported, but they may not
736 behave as on Unix platforms. See L<perlport> for the full list.
738 Signal handling may not behave as on Unix platforms (where it
739 doesn't exactly "behave", either :). For instance, calling C<die()>
740 or C<exit()> from signal handlers will cause an exception, since most
741 implementations of C<signal()> on Win32 are severely crippled.
742 Thus, signals may work only for simple things like setting a flag
743 variable in the handler. Using signals under this port should
744 currently be considered unsupported.
746 Please send detailed descriptions of any problems and solutions that
747 you may find to <F<perlbug@perl.com>>, along with the output produced
750 =head1 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
752 The use of a camel with the topic of Perl is a trademark
753 of O'Reilly and Associates, Inc. Used with permission.
759 =item Gary Ng E<lt>71564.1743@CompuServe.COME<gt>
761 =item Gurusamy Sarathy E<lt>gsar@activestate.comE<gt>
763 =item Nick Ing-Simmons E<lt>nick@ing-simmons.netE<gt>
767 This document is maintained by Gurusamy Sarathy.
775 This port was originally contributed by Gary Ng around 5.003_24,
776 and borrowed from the Hip Communications port that was available
777 at the time. Various people have made numerous and sundry hacks
780 Borland support was added in 5.004_01 (Gurusamy Sarathy).
782 GCC/mingw32 support was added in 5.005 (Nick Ing-Simmons).
784 Support for PERL_OBJECT was added in 5.005 (ActiveState Tool Corp).
786 Support for fork() emulation was added in 5.6 (ActiveState Tool Corp).
788 Win9x support was added in 5.6 (Benjamin Stuhl).
790 Support for 64-bit Windows added in 5.8 (ActiveState Corp).
792 Last updated: 20 April 2002