Also make sure you read the BUGS AND CAVEATS section below for the known limitations of this port.
The INSTALL file in the perl top-level has much information that is only relevant to people building Perl on Unix-like systems. In particular, you can safely ignore any information that talks about ``Configure''.
You may also want to look at two other options for building a perl that will work on Windows NT: the README.cygwin32 and README.os2 files, which each give a different set of rules to build a Perl that will work on Win32 platforms. Those two methods will probably enable you to build a more Unix-compatible perl, but you will also need to download and use various other build-time and run-time support software described in those files.
This set of instructions is meant to describe a so-called ``native'' port of Perl to Win32 platforms. The resulting Perl requires no additional software to run (other than what came with your operating system). Currently, this port is capable of using either the Microsoft Visual C++ compiler, or the Borland C++ compiler. The ultimate goal is to support the other major compilers that can generally be used to build Win32 applications.
This port currently supports MakeMaker (the set of modules that is used to build extensions to perl). Therefore, you should be able to build and install most extensions found in the CPAN sites. See Usage Hints below for general hints about this.
A port of dmake for win32 platforms is available from ``http://www-personal.umich.edu/~gsar/dmake-4.0-win32.tar.gz''. Fetch and install dmake somewhere on your path. Also make sure you copy the Borland dmake.ini file to some location where you keep *.ini files. If you use the binary that comes with the above port, you will need to set INIT in your environment to the directory where you put the dmake.ini file.
You can also use dmake to build using Visual C++, provided: you copied the dmake.ini for Visual C++; set INIT to point to the directory where you put it, as above; and edit win32/config.vc and change ``make=nmake'' to ``make=dmake''. The last step is only essential if you want to use dmake to be your default make for building extensions using MakeMaker.
attrib -R *.* /S
from the perl toplevel directory. You don't have to do this if you used the right tools to extract the files in the standard distribution, but it doesn't hurt to do so.
You will also have to make sure CCHOME points to wherever you installed your compiler.
This should build everything. Specifically, it will create perl.exe, perl.dll, and perlglob.exe at the perl toplevel, and various other extension dll's under the lib\auto directory. If the build fails for any reason, make sure you have done the previous steps correctly.
When building using Visual
C++, a perl95.exe will also get built. This executable is only needed on Windows95, and should be used instead of perl.exe, and then only if you want sockets to work properly on Windows95. This is necessitated by a bug in the Microsoft
C Runtime that cannot be worked around in the ``normal'' perl.exe. Again, if this bugs you, please bug Microsoft :). perl95.exe gets built with its own private copy of the
C Runtime that is not accessible to extensions (which see the
DLL version of the
CRT). Be aware, therefore, that this perl95.exe will have esoteric problems with extensions like perl/Tk that themselves use the
C Runtime heavily, or want to free()
pointers malloc()-ed
by perl.
You can avoid the perl95.exe problems completely if you use Borland C++ for building perl (perl95.exe is not needed and will not be built in that case).
If some tests do fail, it may be because you are using a different command shell than the native ``cmd.exe''.
If you used the Borland compiler, you may see a failure in op/taint.t arising from the inability to find the Borland Runtime DLLs on the system default path. You will need to copy the DLLs reported by the messages from where Borland chose to install it, into the Windows system directory (usually somewhere like C:\WINNT\SYSTEM32), and rerun the test.
Please report any other failures as described under BUGS AND CAVEATS.
INST_TOP
to in the Makefile). It will also install the pod documentation under $INST_TOP\lib\pod
and
HTML versions of the same under $INST_TOP\lib\pod\html
. To use the Perl you just installed, set your
PATH environment variable to ``C:\perl\bin'' (or $INST_TOP\bin
, if you changed the default as above).
If you put extensions in unusual places, you can set PERL5LIB to a list of paths separated by semicolons where you want perl to look for libraries. Look for descriptions of other environment variables you can set in the perlrun podpage.
Sometime in the future, some of the configuration information for perl will be moved into the Windows registry.
perlglob.exe relies on the argv expansion done by the C Runtime of the particular compiler you used, and therefore behaves very differently depending on the Runtime used to build it. To preserve compatiblity, perlglob.bat (a perl script/module that can be used portably) is installed. Besides being portable, perlglob.bat also offers enhanced globbing functionality.
If you want perl to use perlglob.bat instead of perlglob.exe, just delete perlglob.exe from the install location (or move it somewhere perl cannot find). Using File::DosGlob.pm (which is the same as perlglob.bat) to override the internal CORE::glob() works about 10 times faster than spawing perlglob.exe, and you should take this approach when writing new modules. See File::DosGlob for details.
The crucial thing to understand about the ``cmd'' shell (which is the default on Windows NT) is that it does not do any wildcard expansions of command-line arguments (so wildcards need not be quoted). It also provides only rudimentary quoting. The only (useful) quote character is the double quote (``). It can be used to protect spaces in arguments and other special characters. The Windows NT documentation has almost no description of how the quoting rules are implemented, but here are some general observations based on experiments: The shell breaks arguments at spaces and passes them to programs in argc/argv. Doublequotes can be used to prevent arguments with spaces in them from being split up. You can put a double quote in an argument by escaping it with a backslash and enclosing the whole argument within double quotes. The backslash and the pair of double quotes surrounding the argument will be stripped by the shell.
The file redirection characters ``<'', ``>'', and ``|'' cannot be quoted by double quotes (there are probably more such). Single quotes will protect those three file redirection characters, but the single quotes don't get stripped by the shell (just to make this type of quoting completely useless). The caret ``^'' has also been observed to behave as a quoting character (and doesn't get stripped by the shell also).
Here are some examples of usage of the ``cmd'' shell:
This prints two doublequotes:
perl -e "print '\"\"' "
This does the same:
perl -e "print \"\\\"\\\"\" "
This prints ``bar'' and writes ``foo'' to the file ``blurch'':
perl -e "print 'foo'; print STDERR 'bar'" > blurch
This prints ``foo'' (``bar'' disappears into nowhereland):
perl -e "print 'foo'; print STDERR 'bar'" 2> nul
This prints ``bar'' and writes ``foo'' into the file ``blurch'':
perl -e "print 'foo'; print STDERR 'bar'" 1> blurch
This pipes ``foo'' to the ``less'' pager and prints ``bar'' on the console:
perl -e "print 'foo'; print STDERR 'bar'" | less
This pipes ``foo\nbar\n'' to the less pager:
perl -le "print 'foo'; print STDERR 'bar'" 2>&1 | less
This pipes ``foo'' to the pager and writes ``bar'' in the file ``blurch'':
perl -e "print 'foo'; print STDERR 'bar'" 2> blurch | less
Discovering the usage of the ``command.com'' shell on Windows95 is left as an exercise to the reader :)
Most extensions (whether they require a C compiler or not) can be built, tested and installed with the standard mantra:
perl Makefile.PL $MAKE $MAKE test $MAKE install
where $MAKE
stands for
NMAKE or
DMAKE. Some extensions may not provide a testsuite (so
``$MAKE test'' may not do anything, or fail), but most serious ones do.
If a module implements XSUBs, you will need one of the supported C compilers. You must make sure you have set up the environment for the compiler for command-line compilation.
If a module does not build for some reason, look carefully for why it failed, and report problems to the module author. If it looks like the extension building support is at fault, report that with full details of how the build failed using the perlbug utility.
To ensure smooth transitioning of existing code that uses the Activeware port, there is a bundle of Win32 extensions that contains all of the Activeware extensions and most other Win32 extensions from CPAN in source form, along with many added bugfixes, and with MakeMaker support. This bundle is available at:
http://www.perl.com/CPAN/authors/id/GSAR/libwin32-0.06.tar.gz
See the README in that distribution for building and installation instructions. Look for later versions that may be available at the same location.
It is expected that authors of Win32 specific extensions will begin distributing their work in MakeMaker compatible form subsequent to the 5.004 release of perl, at which point the need for a dedicated bundle such as the above should diminish.
perldoc
is also a useful tool for browsing information contained in the
documentation, especially in conjunction with a pager like less (recent versions of which have Win32 support). You may have to set the
PAGER environment variable to use a specific pager.
``perldoc -f foo'' will print information about the perl operator ``foo''.
If you find bugs in perl, you can run perlbug
to create a bug report (you may have to send it manually if perlbug
cannot find a mailer on your system).
The DLLs produced by the two supported compilers are incompatible with each other due to the conventions they use to export symbols, and due to differences in the Runtime libraries that they provide. This means that extension binaries built under either compiler will only work with the perl binaries built under the same compiler. If you know of a robust, freely available C Runtime that can be used under win32, let us know.
If you have had prior exposure to Perl on Unix platforms, you will notice this port exhibits behavior different from what is documented. Most of the differences fall under one of these categories. We do not consider any of them to be serious limitations (especially when compared to the limited nature of some of the Win32 OSes themselves :)
$?
ends up with the exitstatus of the subprocess (this is different from Unix,
where the exitstatus is actually given by ``$? >> 8''). Failure to
spawn()
the subprocess is indicated by setting $? to
``255<<8''. This is subject to change.
perl -V
.
Gurusamy Sarathy <gsar@umich.edu>
Nick Ing-Simmons <nick@ni-s.u-net.com>
Nick Ing-Simmons and Gurusamy Sarathy have made numerous and sundry hacks since then.
Borland support was added in 5.004_01 (Gurusamy Sarathy).
Last updated: 11 June 1997