ActivePerl User Guide
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ActivePerl User Guide
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ActivePerl-faq1 - Availability and Installation
Getting, installing, and using Perl.
Perl is a scripting language widely used for system administration and programming on the World Wide Web. It originated in the UNIX community and has a strong UNIX slant, but usage on Windows is growing rapidly. ActivePerl is a port of core Perl to Windows.
perl (small 'p') is the program used to interpret the Perl language.
Extensive online documentation is included with Perl itself. You can read the
documentation with the perldoc command, as in perldoc
document_name. You should start with the perl document and the perlfaq
document. For information on other ways of accessing the Perl documentation
(including HTML versions of this documentation), see Where
can I get documentation on ActivePerl?.
To get more information about Perl, check out these URLs:
http://www.ActiveState.com - The ActivePerl Home Page.
http://www.perl.com - The Perl home page.
http://www.yahoo.com/Computers_and_Internet/Programming_Languages/Perl/ - The Yahoo Perl page.
There are several good books about Perl. The premier book on ActivePerl is Learning Perl On Win32 Systems By Schwartz, Olson, and Christiansen (O'Reilly & Associates, 1997). This is the Gecko book, and has a picture of a gecko (little chubby lizard with big toes and a smile) on the front cover.
For general perl, two books to consider are Programming Perl, 3rd Edition, by Larry Wall, Tom Christiansen and Randal L. Schwartz (O'Reilly & Associates, 1996) and Learning Perl, 3rd Edition, by Randal L. Schwartz (O'Reilly & Associates, 1993). These are referred to by Perl enthusiasts as the Camel book and the Llama book, respectively.
If you are new to Perl and there are any terms mentioned in this FAQ that you don't get, try one of the above resources. See the perlbook document that comes with Perl for more information.
ActivePerl is available from the ActiveState home page.
To download ActivePerl from ActiveState, look in this directory:
http://www.ActiveState.com/ActivePerl
ActivePerl is a complete, self-installing distribution of Perl based on the standard Perl sources. It is distributed online at the ActiveState site.
"Perl for Win32" generally refers to ActivePerl for Windows.
This package installs Perl in: /usr/local/ActivePerl-5.6
To install, run:
dpkg -i ActivePerl-5.6.1.6XX-i686-linux.deb
This package installs Perl in: /usr/local/ActivePerl-5.6
To install into the default location, run:
rpm -i ActivePerl-5.6.1.6XX-i686-linux.rpm
To install in a location other than the default, use the '--prefix' option as below:
rpm -i --prefix /opt/myperl ActivePerl-5.6.1.6XX-i686-linux.rpm
Copy ActivePerl-5.6.1.6XX-i686-linux.tar.gz into a temporary directory.
To install:
tar -xzf ActivePerl-5.6.1.6XX-i686-linux.tar.gz cd ActivePerl-5.6.1.6XX sh install.sh
The installer will prompt you for a location for the installation.
This package installs Perl in: /usr/local/ActivePerl-5.6
Copy ActivePerl-5.6.1.6XX-sun4-solaris.gz into a temporary
directory.
To install:
gunzip ActivePerl-5.6.1.6XX-sun4-solaris.gz pkgadd -d ActivePerl-5.6.1.6XX-sun4-solaris
pkgadd will prompt you for the installation location.
Copy ActivePerl-5.6.1.6XX-sun4-solaris.tar.gz into a
temporary directory.
To install:
tar -xzf ActivePerl-5.6.1.6XX-sun4-solaris.tar.gz cd ActivePerl-5.6.1.6XX sh install.sh
The installer will prompt you for a location for the installation.
Run the MSI installation package to start the installation wizard, which will guide you through the setup, and give you options on what and where to install stuff.
Perl is installed by default in C:\Perl. The drive "C"
may vary; it will usually be the same that the operating system is installed on.
If you run Perl at the command prompt, the script will be executed by the
first Perl.exe it encounters in the list of paths in the PATH environment
variable. To ensure the script is executed by the Perl build you want it to be
executed by, you can specify the complete path to the Perl.exe you want to use.
(typing perl -v at the command prompt will tell you which version
of Perl is currently first in your PATH).
Installing ActivePerl will change your Path environment variable and may change registry settings, such as file associations, which may affect your Web server. If you want to use a previously installed copy of Perl, you will need to modify these settings.
The short answer is yes!! If you have environment variables such as PERLLIB, PERL5LIB or PERL5OPT set, incompatible versions of modules may be used during the installation process and this may cause the installation to fail. If you have any of these environment variables set, you should temporarily unset the variables, reboot the system and then attempt the installation of ActivePerl. These environment variables are checked by all installed versions of Perl, if you have multiple versions of Perl installed it is not a good idea to set these environment variables globally.
To uninstall, run:
dpkg -r ActivePerl
To uninstall, run:
rpm -e ActivePerl
To uninstall, simply remove the directory into which ActivePerl was installed. For example:
/bin/rm -rf /usr/local/ActivePerl-5.6
To uninstall, run:
pkgrm -d ASperl
To uninstall, simply remove the directory into which ActivePerl was installed. For example:
/bin/rm -rf /usr/local/ActivePerl-5.6
Goto the Control Panel, and run the Add/Remove Programs applet. Select the ActiveState ActivePerl entry and click Remove to uninstall ActivePerl.
The Perl source code includes complete instructions on building Perl. You can obtain the latest Perl source from:
http://www.perl.com/CPAN/src/latest.tar.gz
Once you extract the source, read the README file for instructions on compiling Perl.
This FAQ was originally assembled and maintained by Evangelo Prodromou. It has been revised and updated by Brian Jepson of O'Reilly & Associates, David Grove, David Dmytryshyn, David Sparks and Michael Smith of ActiveState.
This FAQ is in the public domain. If you use it, however, please ensure that you give credit to the original authors.
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ActivePerl FAQ - Availability and Installation |