ActivePerl User Guide

Contents

• What is ActivePerl
• Getting Started
• Troubleshooting FAQ
• Questions, Comments, and Info

What is ActivePerl?

The ActivePerl Package is the most significant and exciting advance in Perl  platforms! This is the long-awaited "merge" of the popular Perl ports, and has the absolute best of both plus more!

New Features in ActivePerl 5.6:

• Globalization and Unicode
• Concurrent Interpreters
• Granularity of warnings
• New regex constructs
• Additional documentation and tutorials
• Lvalue subroutines
• Subroutine attributes
• 64-bit platforms
• Large File Systems

The complete ActivePerl Package contains:

• Perl - binary of core perl distribution
• Complete Online documentation
• Perl Package Manager - Perl extension installer and manager.

The Windows version also includes:

• Perl for ISAPI - IIS plug-in that makes perl CGI faster
• PerlScript - ActiveX scripting engine, like JavaScript or VBScript with a Perl brain
• PerlEz - Embedded Perl

Getting Started

Running Perl scripts from the command line

To run your Perl scripts, type:

perl <scriptname>

at the command prompt, where <scriptname> is the name of the script you want to launch. Also, if you are using Windows and have associated the extension of the file with perl, typing <scriptname> will also launch the script.

Sample Script

In the /eg directory of your Perl install there is a sample script named example.pl To run it, launch a console window, make the /eg directory your current working directory and type:

• perl example.pl

You should see:

• "Hello from ActivePerl!"

If you do, you've successfully installed ActivePerl! If not, there's something wrong with your install. Check to make sure that your Path environment variable includes the directories to which you installed the Perl core binaries. (You can type set at the command prompt to see what's in your Path.) If you chose the defaults during the install, these should be set to the correct values for you when you start a new command prompt.

One last note, typing perl -h will display all of the available command line options available to you.

Troubleshooting FAQ

The ActivePerl Package comes with the newly updated collection of Frequently Asked Questions about ActivePerl. The FAQ is a valuable source of distilled wisdom about using Perl. It is a must read!

Questions, comments and info

We're interested in what you have to say. Do you have something that used to work that just doesn't work anymore? Any incompatibilities? Let us know! We can't guarantee that all suggestions will be implemented in future releases, but we'll do our best!

Please submit bug reports here. All bug reports should be accompanied by one or more concrete examples that will help us reproduce the problem. Include all relevant information that you think will help us recreate the particular environment in which the bug was observed. Remember, if we cannot reproduce the problem, we cannot fix it!

General help and questions about using ActivePerl are available from the ActivePerl mailing list. ActiveState also hosts several other highly engaging mailing-lists on various topics related to Perl.

Before posting to any of the mailing lists, please be sure to read the online documentation included with every copy of ActivePerl, which includes the Perl FAQ, and the ActivePerl FAQ.

Thanks!