{ "content": [ { "type": "text", "text": "# perlutil (man)\n\n## NAME\n\nperlutil - utilities packaged with the Perl distribution\n\n## DESCRIPTION\n\nAlong with the Perl interpreter itself, the Perl distribution installs a range of utilities\non your system. There are also several utilities which are used by the Perl distribution\nitself as part of the install process. This document exists to list all of these utilities,\nexplain what they are for and provide pointers to each module's documentation, if\nappropriate.\n\n## Sections\n\n- **NAME**\n- **DESCRIPTION**\n- **LIST OF UTILITIES** (6 subsections)\n- **SEE ALSO**\n\nUse structuredContent.sections for detailed options, examples, and full documentation.\n" } ], "structuredContent": { "command": "perlutil", "section": "", "mode": "man", "summary": "perlutil - utilities packaged with the Perl distribution", "synopsis": null, "tldr_summary": null, "tldr_examples": [], "tldr_source": null, "flags": [], "examples": [], "see_also": [], "section_outline": [ { "name": "NAME", "lines": 2, "subsections": [] }, { "name": "DESCRIPTION", "lines": 6, "subsections": [] }, { "name": "LIST OF UTILITIES", "lines": 1, "subsections": [ { "name": "Documentation", "lines": 36 }, { "name": "Converters", "lines": 4 }, { "name": "Administration", "lines": 8 }, { "name": "Development", "lines": 46 }, { "name": "General tools", "lines": 37 }, { "name": "Installation", "lines": 13 } ] }, { "name": "SEE ALSO", "lines": 5, "subsections": [] } ], "sections": { "NAME": { "content": "perlutil - utilities packaged with the Perl distribution\n", "subsections": [] }, "DESCRIPTION": { "content": "Along with the Perl interpreter itself, the Perl distribution installs a range of utilities\non your system. There are also several utilities which are used by the Perl distribution\nitself as part of the install process. This document exists to list all of these utilities,\nexplain what they are for and provide pointers to each module's documentation, if\nappropriate.\n", "subsections": [] }, "LIST OF UTILITIES": { "content": "", "subsections": [ { "name": "Documentation", "content": "perldoc\nThe main interface to Perl's documentation is perldoc, although if you're reading this,\nit's more than likely that you've already found it. perldoc will extract and format the\ndocumentation from any file in the current directory, any Perl module installed on the\nsystem, or any of the standard documentation pages, such as this one. Use \"perldoc \"\nto get information on any of the utilities described in this document.\n\npod2man\npod2text\nIf it's run from a terminal, perldoc will usually call pod2man to translate POD (Plain Old\nDocumentation - see perlpod for an explanation) into a manpage, and then run man to\ndisplay it; if man isn't available, pod2text will be used instead and the output piped\nthrough your favourite pager.\n\npod2html\nAs well as these two, there is another converter: pod2html will produce HTML pages from\nPOD.\n\npod2usage\nIf you just want to know how to use the utilities described here, pod2usage will just\nextract the \"USAGE\" section; some of the utilities will automatically call pod2usage on\nthemselves when you call them with \"-help\".\n\npodchecker\nIf you're writing your own documentation in POD, the podchecker utility will look for\nerrors in your markup.\n\nsplain\nsplain is an interface to perldiag - paste in your error message to it, and it'll explain\nit for you.\n\nroffitall\nThe roffitall utility is not installed on your system but lives in the pod/ directory of\nyour Perl source kit; it converts all the documentation from the distribution to *roff\nformat, and produces a typeset PostScript or text file of the whole lot.\n" }, { "name": "Converters", "content": "pl2pm\nTo help you convert legacy programs to more modern Perl, the pl2pm utility will help you\nconvert old-style Perl 4 libraries to new-style Perl5 modules.\n" }, { "name": "Administration", "content": "libnetcfg\nTo display and change the libnet configuration run the libnetcfg command.\n\nperlivp\nThe perlivp program is set up at Perl source code build time to test the Perl version it\nwas built under. It can be used after running \"make install\" (or your platform's\nequivalent procedure) to verify that perl and its libraries have been installed correctly.\n" }, { "name": "Development", "content": "There are a set of utilities which help you in developing Perl programs, and in particular,\nextending Perl with C.\n\nperlbug\nperlbug used to be the recommended way to report bugs in the perl interpreter itself or\nany of the standard library modules back to the developers; bug reports and patches should\nnow be submitted to .\n\nperlthanks\nThis program provides an easy way to send a thank-you message back to the authors and\nmaintainers of perl. It's just perlbug installed under another name.\n\nh2ph\nBack before Perl had the XS system for connecting with C libraries, programmers used to\nget library constants by reading through the C header files. You may still see\n\"require 'syscall.ph'\" or similar around - the .ph file should be created by running h2ph\non the corresponding .h file. See the h2ph documentation for more on how to convert a\nwhole bunch of header files at once.\n\nh2xs\nh2xs converts C header files into XS modules, and will try and write as much glue between\nC libraries and Perl modules as it can. It's also very useful for creating skeletons of\npure Perl modules.\n\nenc2xs\nenc2xs builds a Perl extension for use by Encode from either Unicode Character Mapping\nfiles (.ucm) or Tcl Encoding Files (.enc). Besides being used internally during the build\nprocess of the Encode module, you can use enc2xs to add your own encoding to perl. No\nknowledge of XS is necessary.\n\nxsubpp\nxsubpp is a compiler to convert Perl XS code into C code. It is typically run by the\nmakefiles created by ExtUtils::MakeMaker.\n\nxsubpp will compile XS code into C code by embedding the constructs necessary to let C\nfunctions manipulate Perl values and creates the glue necessary to let Perl access those\nfunctions.\n\nprove\nprove is a command-line interface to the test-running functionality of Test::Harness.\nIt's an alternative to \"make test\".\n\ncorelist\nA command-line front-end to Module::CoreList, to query what modules were shipped with\ngiven versions of perl.\n" }, { "name": "General tools", "content": "A few general-purpose tools are shipped with perl, mostly because they came along modules\nincluded in the perl distribution.\n\nencguess\nencguess will attempt to guess the character encoding of files.\n\njsonpp\njsonpp is a pure Perl JSON converter and formatter.\n\npiconv\npiconv is a Perl version of iconv(1), a character encoding converter widely available for\nvarious Unixen today. This script was primarily a technology demonstrator for Perl\nv5.8.0, but you can use piconv in the place of iconv for virtually any case.\n\nptar\nptar is a tar-like program, written in pure Perl.\n\nptardiff\nptardiff is a small utility that produces a diff between an extracted archive and an\nunextracted one. (Note that this utility requires the Text::Diff module to function\nproperly; this module isn't distributed with perl, but is available from the CPAN.)\n\nptargrep\nptargrep is a utility to apply pattern matching to the contents of files in a tar archive.\n\nshasum\nThis utility, that comes with the Digest::SHA module, is used to print or verify SHA\nchecksums.\n\nstreamzip\nstreamzip compresses data streamed to STDIN into a streamed zip container.\n\nzipdetails\nzipdetails displays information about the internal record structure of the zip file. It\nis not concerned with displaying any details of the compressed data stored in the zip\nfile.\n" }, { "name": "Installation", "content": "These utilities help manage extra Perl modules that don't come with the perl distribution.\n\ncpan\ncpan is a command-line interface to CPAN.pm. It allows you to install modules or\ndistributions from CPAN, or just get information about them, and a lot more. It is\nsimilar to the command line mode of the CPAN module,\n\nperl -MCPAN -e shell\n\ninstmodsh\nA little interface to ExtUtils::Installed to examine installed modules, validate your\npacklists and even create a tarball from an installed module.\n" } ] }, "SEE ALSO": { "content": "perldoc, pod2man, pod2text, pod2html, pod2usage, podchecker, splain, pl2pm, perlbug, h2ph,\nh2xs, enc2xs, xsubpp, cpan, encguess, instmodsh, jsonpp, piconv, prove, corelist, ptar,\nptardiff, shasum, streamzip, zipdetails\n\nperl v5.38.2 2026-06-12 PERLUTIL(1)", "subsections": [] } } } }