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.IX Title "PERLUTIL 1"
.TH PERLUTIL 1 2025-07-25 "perl v5.42.0" "Perl Programmers Reference Guide"
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.SH NAME
perlutil \- utilities packaged with the Perl distribution
.SH DESCRIPTION
.IX Header "DESCRIPTION"
Along with the Perl interpreter itself, the Perl distribution installs a
range of utilities on your system. There are also several utilities
which are used by the Perl distribution itself as part of the install
process. This document exists to list all of these utilities, explain
what they are for and provide pointers to each module\*(Aqs documentation,
if appropriate.
.SH "LIST OF UTILITIES"
.IX Header "LIST OF UTILITIES"
.SS Documentation
.IX Subsection "Documentation"
.IP perldoc 3
.IX Item "perldoc"
The main interface to Perl\*(Aqs documentation is \fIperldoc\fR, although
if you\*(Aqre reading this, it\*(Aqs more than likely that you\*(Aqve already found
it. \fIperldoc\fR will extract and format the documentation from any file
in the current directory, any Perl module installed on the system, or
any of the standard documentation pages, such as this one. Use 
\&\f(CW\*(C`perldoc <name>\*(C'\fR to get information on any of the utilities
described in this document.
.IP pod2man 3
.IX Item "pod2man"
.PD 0
.IP pod2text 3
.IX Item "pod2text"
.PD
If it\*(Aqs run from a terminal, \fIperldoc\fR will usually call \fIpod2man\fR to
translate POD (Plain Old Documentation \- see perlpod for an
explanation) into a manpage, and then run \fIman\fR to display it; if
\&\fIman\fR isn\*(Aqt available, \fIpod2text\fR will be used instead and the output
piped through your favourite pager.
.IP pod2html 3
.IX Item "pod2html"
As well as these two, there is another converter: \fIpod2html\fR will
produce HTML pages from POD.
.IP pod2usage 3
.IX Item "pod2usage"
If you just want to know how to use the utilities described here,
\&\fIpod2usage\fR will just extract the "USAGE" section; some of
the utilities will automatically call \fIpod2usage\fR on themselves when
you call them with \f(CW\*(C`\-help\*(C'\fR.
.IP podchecker 3
.IX Item "podchecker"
If you\*(Aqre writing your own documentation in POD, the \fIpodchecker\fR
utility will look for errors in your markup.
.IP splain 3
.IX Item "splain"
\&\fIsplain\fR is an interface to perldiag \- paste in your error message
to it, and it\*(Aqll explain it for you.
.IP \fIroffitall\fR 3
.IX Item "roffitall"
The \fIroffitall\fR utility is not installed on your system but lives in
the \fIpod/\fR directory of your Perl source kit; it converts all the
documentation from the distribution to \fI*roff\fR format, and produces a
typeset PostScript or text file of the whole lot.
.SS Converters
.IX Subsection "Converters"
.IP pl2pm 3
.IX Item "pl2pm"
To help you convert legacy programs to more modern Perl, the
\&\fIpl2pm\fR utility will help you convert old\-style Perl 4 libraries
to new\-style Perl5 modules.
.SS Administration
.IX Subsection "Administration"
.IP libnetcfg 3
.IX Item "libnetcfg"
To display and change the libnet configuration run the libnetcfg command.
.IP perlivp 3
.IX Item "perlivp"
The \fIperlivp\fR program is set up at Perl source code build time to test
the Perl version it was built under.  It can be used after running \f(CW\*(C`make
install\*(C'\fR (or your platform\*(Aqs equivalent procedure) to verify that perl
and its libraries have been installed correctly.
.SS Development
.IX Subsection "Development"
There are a set of utilities which help you in developing Perl programs, 
and in particular, extending Perl with C.
.IP perlbug 3
.IX Item "perlbug"
\&\fIperlbug\fR used to be the recommended way to report bugs in the perl
interpreter itself or any of the standard library modules back to the
developers; bug reports and patches should now be submitted to
<https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues>.
.IP perlthanks 3
.IX Item "perlthanks"
This program provides an easy way to send a thank\-you message back to the
authors and maintainers of perl. It\*(Aqs just \fIperlbug\fR installed under
another name.
.IP h2ph 3
.IX Item "h2ph"
Back before Perl had the XS system for connecting with C libraries,
programmers used to get library constants by reading through the C
header files. You may still see \f(CW\*(C`require\ \*(Aqsyscall.ph\*(Aq\*(C'\fR or similar
around \- the \fI.ph\fR file should be created by running \fIh2ph\fR on the
corresponding \fI.h\fR file. See the h2ph documentation for more on how
to convert a whole bunch of header files at once.
.IP h2xs 3
.IX Item "h2xs"
\&\fIh2xs\fR converts C header files into XS modules, and will try and write
as much glue between C libraries and Perl modules as it can. It\*(Aqs also
very useful for creating skeletons of pure Perl modules.
.IP enc2xs 3
.IX Item "enc2xs"
\&\fIenc2xs\fR builds a Perl extension for use by Encode from either
Unicode Character Mapping files (.ucm) or Tcl Encoding Files (.enc).
Besides being used internally during the build process of the Encode
module, you can use \fIenc2xs\fR to add your own encoding to perl.
No knowledge of XS is necessary.
.IP xsubpp 3
.IX Item "xsubpp"
\&\fIxsubpp\fR is a compiler to convert Perl XS code into C code.
It is typically run by the makefiles created by ExtUtils::MakeMaker.
.Sp
\&\fIxsubpp\fR will compile XS code into C code by embedding the constructs
necessary to let C functions manipulate Perl values and creates the glue
necessary to let Perl access those functions.
.IP prove 3
.IX Item "prove"
\&\fIprove\fR is a command\-line interface to the test\-running functionality
of Test::Harness.  It\*(Aqs an alternative to \f(CW\*(C`make test\*(C'\fR.
.IP corelist 3
.IX Item "corelist"
A command\-line front\-end to Module::CoreList, to query what modules
were shipped with given versions of perl.
.SS "General tools"
.IX Subsection "General tools"
A few general\-purpose tools are shipped with perl, mostly because they
came along modules included in the perl distribution.
.IP encguess 3
.IX Item "encguess"
\&\fIencguess\fR will attempt to guess the character encoding of files.
.IP json_pp 3
.IX Item "json_pp"
\&\fIjson_pp\fR is a pure Perl JSON converter and formatter.
.IP piconv 3
.IX Item "piconv"
\&\fIpiconv\fR is a Perl version of \fBiconv\fR\|(1), a character encoding converter
widely available for various Unixen today.  This script was primarily a
technology demonstrator for Perl v5.8.0, but you can use piconv in the
place of iconv for virtually any case.
.IP ptar 3
.IX Item "ptar"
\&\fIptar\fR is a tar\-like program, written in pure Perl.
.IP ptardiff 3
.IX Item "ptardiff"
\&\fIptardiff\fR is a small utility that produces a diff between an extracted
archive and an unextracted one. (Note that this utility requires the
Text::Diff module to function properly; this module isn\*(Aqt distributed
with perl, but is available from the CPAN.)
.IP ptargrep 3
.IX Item "ptargrep"
\&\fIptargrep\fR is a utility to apply pattern matching to the contents of files 
in a tar archive.
.IP shasum 3
.IX Item "shasum"
This utility, that comes with the Digest::SHA module, is used to print
or verify SHA checksums.
.IP streamzip 3
.IX Item "streamzip"
\&\fIstreamzip\fR compresses data streamed to STDIN into a streamed zip container.
.IP zipdetails 3
.IX Item "zipdetails"
\&\fIzipdetails\fR displays information about the internal record structure of the zip file.
It is not concerned with displaying any details of the compressed data stored in the zip file.
.SS Installation
.IX Subsection "Installation"
These utilities help manage extra Perl modules that don\*(Aqt come with the perl
distribution.
.IP cpan 3
.IX Item "cpan"
\&\fIcpan\fR is a command\-line interface to CPAN.pm.  It allows you to install
modules or distributions from CPAN, or just get information about them, and
a lot more.  It is similar to the command line mode of the CPAN module,
.Sp
.Vb 1
\&    perl \-MCPAN \-e shell
.Ve
.IP instmodsh 3
.IX Item "instmodsh"
A little interface to ExtUtils::Installed to examine installed modules,
validate your packlists and even create a tarball from an installed module.
.SH "SEE ALSO"
.IX Header "SEE ALSO"
perldoc, pod2man, pod2text, pod2html, pod2usage,
podchecker, splain, pl2pm,
perlbug, h2ph, h2xs, enc2xs,
xsubpp, cpan, encguess, instmodsh, json_pp,
piconv, prove, corelist, ptar,
ptardiff, shasum, streamzip, zipdetails
