perlrun - how to execute the Perl interpreter
perl [ -sTuU ] [ -hv ] [ -V[:configvar] ] [ -cw ] [ -d[:debugger] ] [ -D[number/list] ] [ -pna ] [ -Fpattern ] [ -l[octal] ] [ -0[octal] ] [ -Idir ] [ -m[-]module ] [ -M[-]'module...' ] [ -P ] [ -S ] [ -x[dir] ] [ -i[extension] ] [ -e 'command' ] [ -- ] [ programfile ] [ argument ]...
Upon startup, Perl looks for your script in one of the following places:
Specified line by line via -e switches on the command line.
With methods 2 and 3, Perl starts parsing the input file from the
beginning, unless you've specified a -x switch, in which case it scans for the first line starting with #! and
containing the word ``perl'', and starts there instead. This is useful for
running a script embedded in a larger message. (In this case you would
indicate the end of the script using the __END__ token.)
The #! line is always examined for switches as the line is being parsed. Thus, if you're on a machine that allows only one argument with the #! line, or worse, doesn't even recognize the #! line, you still can get consistent switch behavior regardless of how Perl was invoked, even if -x was used to find the beginning of the script.
Because many operating systems silently chop off kernel interpretation of the #! line after 32 characters, some switches may be passed in on the command line, and some may not; you could even get a ``-'' without its letter, if you're not careful. You probably want to make sure that all your switches fall either before or after that 32 character boundary. Most switches don't actually care if they're processed redundantly, but getting a - instead of a complete switch could cause Perl to try to execute standard input instead of your script. And a partial -I switch could also cause odd results.
Some switches do care if they are processed twice, for instance
combinations of -l and -0. Either put all the switches after the 32 character boundary (if
applicable), or replace the use of -0digits by
BEGIN{ $/ = "\0digits"; }.
Parsing of the #! switches starts wherever ``perl'' is mentioned in the line. The sequences ``-*'' and ``- '' are specifically ignored so that you could, if you were so inclined, say
#!/bin/sh -- # -*- perl -*- -p
eval 'exec /usr/bin/perl -wS $0 ${1+"$@"}'
if $running_under_some_shell;
to let Perl see the -p switch.
If the #! line does not contain the word ``perl'', the program named after the #! is executed instead of the Perl interpreter. This is slightly bizarre, but it helps people on machines that don't do #!, because they can tell a program that their SHELL is /usr/bin/perl, and Perl will then dispatch the program to the correct interpreter for them.
After locating your script, Perl compiles the entire script to an internal form. If there are any compilation errors, execution of the script is not attempted. (This is unlike the typical shell script, which might run part-way through before finding a syntax error.)
If the script is syntactically correct, it is executed. If the script runs off the end without hitting an
exit() or
die() operator, an implicit
exit(0) is provided to indicate successful completion.
Unix's #! technique can be simulated on other systems:
extproc perl -S -your_switches
as the first line in *.cmd file (-S due to a bug in cmd.exe's `extproc' handling).
ALTERNATIVE_SHEBANG (see the dosish.h file in the source distribution for more information).
Command-interpreters on non-Unix systems have rather different ideas on
quoting than Unix shells. You'll need to learn the special characters in
your command-interpreter (*, \ and " are common) and how to protect whitespace and these characters to run
one-liners (see -e below).
On some systems, you may have to change single-quotes to double ones, which you must NOT do on Unix or Plan9 systems. You might also have to change a single % to a %%.
For example:
# Unix
perl -e 'print "Hello world\n"'
# MS-DOS, etc.
perl -e "print \"Hello world\n\""
# Macintosh
print "Hello world\n"
(then Run "Myscript" or Shift-Command-R)
# VMS
perl -e "print ""Hello world\n"""
The problem is that none of this is reliable: it depends on the command and it is entirely possible neither works. If 4DOS was the command shell, this would probably work better:
perl -e "print <Ctrl-x>"Hello world\n<Ctrl-x>""
CMD.EXE in Windows NT slipped a lot of standard Unix functionality in when nobody was looking, but just try to find documentation for its quoting rules.
Under the Macintosh, it depends which environment you are using. The MacPerl shell, or MPW, is much like Unix shells in its support for several quoting variants, except that it makes free use of the Macintosh's non-ASCII characters as control characters.
There is no general solution to all of this. It's just a mess.
It may seem obvious to say, but Perl is useful only when users can easily find it. When possible, it's good for both /usr/bin/perl and /usr/local/bin/perl to be symlinks to the actual binary. If that can't be done, system administrators are strongly encouraged to put (symlinks to) perl and its accompanying utilities, such as perldoc, into a directory typically found along a user's PATH, or in another obvious and convenient place.
In this documentation, #!/usr/bin/perl on the first line of the script will stand in for whatever method works on
your system.
A single-character switch may be combined with the following switch, if any.
#!/usr/bin/perl -spi.bak # same as -s -p -i.bak
Switches include:
$/) as an octal number. If there are no digits, the null character is the
separator. Other switches may precede or follow the digits. For example, if
you have a version of
find which can print filenames terminated by the null character, you can say
this:
find . -name '*.bak' -print0 | perl -n0e unlink
The special value 00 will cause Perl to slurp files in paragraph mode. The value 0777 will cause Perl to slurp files whole because there is no legal character with that value.
@F array is done as the
first thing inside the implicit while loop produced by the -n or -p.
perl -ane 'print pop(@F), "\n";'
is equivalent to
while (<>) {
@F = split(' ');
print pop(@F), "\n";
}
An alternate delimiter may be specified using -F.
BEGIN, END, and use blocks, because these are considered as occurring outside the execution of
your program.
1 p Tokenizing and parsing
2 s Stack snapshots
4 l Context (loop) stack processing
8 t Trace execution
16 o Method and overloading resolution
32 c String/numeric conversions
64 P Print preprocessor command for -P
128 m Memory allocation
256 f Format processing
512 r Regular expression parsing and execution
1024 x Syntax tree dump
2048 u Tainting checks
4096 L Memory leaks (needs C<-DLEAKTEST> when compiling Perl)
8192 H Hash dump -- usurps values()
16384 X Scratchpad allocation
32768 D Cleaning up
65536 S Thread synchronization
All these flags require -DDEBUGGING when you compile the Perl executable. This flag is automatically set if you
include -g
option when Configure asks you about optimizer/debugger flags.
//, "", or '', otherwise it will be put in single quotes.
<> construct are to be edited in-place. It does this by renaming the input file, opening the output file by the original name, and selecting that output file as the default for
print() statements. The extension, if supplied, is used to modify the name of the old file to make a backup copy, following these rules:
If no extension is supplied, no backup is made and the current file is overwritten.
If the extension doesn't contain a * then it is appended to the end of the current filename as a suffix.
If the extension does contain one or more * characters, then each *
is replaced with the current filename. In perl terms you could think of
this as:
($backup = $extension) =~ s/\*/$file_name/g;
This allows you to add a prefix to the backup file, instead of (or in addition to) a suffix:
$ perl -pi'bak_*' -e 's/bar/baz/' fileA # backup to 'bak_fileA'
Or even to place backup copies of the original files into another directory (provided the directory already exists):
$ perl -pi'old/*.bak' -e 's/bar/baz/' fileA # backup to 'old/fileA.bak'
These sets of one-liners are equivalent:
$ perl -pi -e 's/bar/baz/' fileA # overwrite current file
$ perl -pi'*' -e 's/bar/baz/' fileA # overwrite current file
$ perl -pi'.bak' -e 's/bar/baz/' fileA # backup to 'fileA.bak'
$ perl -pi'*.bak' -e 's/bar/baz/' fileA # backup to 'fileA.bak'
From the shell, saying
$ perl -p -i.bak -e "s/foo/bar/; ... "
is the same as using the script:
#!/usr/bin/perl -pi.bak
s/foo/bar/;
which is equivalent to
#!/usr/bin/perl
$extension = '.bak';
while (<>) {
if ($ARGV ne $oldargv) {
if ($extension !~ /\*/) {
$backup = $ARGV . $extension;
}
else {
($backup = $extension) =~ s/\*/$ARGV/g;
}
rename($ARGV, $backup);
open(ARGVOUT, ">$ARGV");
select(ARGVOUT);
$oldargv = $ARGV;
}
s/foo/bar/;
}
continue {
print; # this prints to original filename
}
select(STDOUT);
except that the -i form doesn't need to compare $ARGV to $oldargv to know when the filename has changed. It does, however, use
ARGVOUT for the selected filehandle. Note that
STDOUT is restored as the default output filehandle after the loop.
As shown above, Perl creates the backup file whether or not any output is actually changed. So this is just a fancy way to copy files:
$ perl -p -i'/some/file/path/*' -e 1 file1 file2 file3...
or
$ perl -p -i'.bak' -e 1 file1 file2 file3...
You can use eof without parentheses to locate the end of each input file, in case you want to append to each file, or reset line numbering (see example in eof).
If, for a given file, Perl is unable to create the backup file as specified in the extension then it will skip that file and continue on with the next one (if it exists).
For a discussion of issues surrounding file permissions and -i, see
Why does Perl let me delete read-only files? Why does -i clobber protected files? Isn't this a bug in Perl?.
You cannot use -i to create directories or to strip extensions from files.
Perl does not expand ~, so don't do that.
Finally, note that the -i switch does not impede execution when no files are given on the command line. In this case, no backup is made (the original file cannot, of course, be determined) and processing proceeds from STDIN to STDOUT as might be expected.
@INC), and also tells the
C preprocessor where to search for include files. The
C preprocessor is invoked with
-P; by default it searches /usr/include and /usr/lib/perl.
$/'' (the input record separator) when used with -n or -p, and second, it assigns ``$\'' (the output record separator) to have the value of octnum so that any print statements will have that separator added back on. If
octnum is omitted, sets ``$\'' to the current value of ``$/''. For instance, to trim lines to 80 columns:
perl -lpe 'substr($_, 80) = ""'
Note that the assignment $\ = $/ is done when the switch is processed, so the input record separator can be
different than the output record separator if the -l switch is followed by a -0 switch:
gnufind / -print0 | perl -ln0e 'print "found $_" if -p'
This sets $\ to newline and then sets $/ to the null character.
(); before executing your script.
-Mmodule executes use module ; before executing your script. You can use quotes to add extra code after
the module name, e.g., -M'module qw(foo bar)'.
If the first character after the -M or -m is a dash (-) then the 'use' is replaced with 'no'.
A little builtin syntactic sugar means you can also
say
-mmodule=foo,bar or -Mmodule=foo,bar as a shortcut for
-M'module qw(foo bar)'. This avoids the need to use quotes when importing symbols. The actual
code generated by -Mmodule=foo,bar is
use module split(/,/,q{foo,bar}). Note that the = form removes the distinction between -m and -M.
while (<>) {
... # your script goes here
}
Note that the lines are not printed by default. See -p to have lines printed. If a file named by an argument cannot be opened for some reason, Perl warns you about it, and moves on to the next file.
Here is an efficient way to delete all files older than a week:
find . -mtime +7 -print | perl -nle 'unlink;'
This is faster than using the -exec switch of find because you don't have to start a process on every filename found.
BEGIN and END blocks may be used to capture control before or after the implicit loop,
just as in awk.
while (<>) {
... # your script goes here
} continue {
print or die "-p destination: $!\n";
}
If a file named by an argument cannot be opened for some reason, Perl warns you about it, and moves on to the next file. Note that the lines are printed automatically. An error occuring during printing is treated as fatal. To suppress printing use the -n switch. A -p overrides a -n switch.
BEGIN and END blocks may be used to capture control before or after the implicit loop,
just as in awk.
@ARGV and sets the
corresponding variable in the Perl script. The following script prints
``true'' if and only if the script is invoked with a -xyz switch.
#!/usr/bin/perl -s
if ($xyz) { print "true\n"; }
If the filename supplied contains directory separators (i.e. it is an absolute or relative pathname), and if the file is not found, platforms that append file extensions will do so and try to look for the file with those extensions added, one by one.
On DOS-like platforms, if the script does not contain directory separators, it will first be searched for in the current directory before being searched for on the PATH. On Unix platforms, the script will be searched for strictly on the PATH.
Typically this is used to emulate #! startup on platforms that don't support #!. This example works on many platforms that have a shell compatible with Bourne shell:
#!/usr/bin/perl
eval 'exec /usr/bin/perl -wS $0 ${1+"$@"}'
if $running_under_some_shell;
The system ignores the first line and feeds the script to /bin/sh, which
proceeds to try to execute the Perl script as a shell script. The shell
executes the second line as a normal shell command, and thus starts up the
Perl interpreter. On some systems $0 doesn't always contain
the full pathname, so the -S tells Perl to search for the script if necessary. After Perl locates the
script, it parses the lines and ignores them because the variable
$running_under_some_shell is never true. If the script will be
interpreted by csh, you will need to replace ${1+"$@"} with $*, even though that doesn't understand embedded spaces (and such) in the
argument list. To start up sh rather than csh, some systems may have to
replace the #! line with a line containing just a colon, which will be
politely ignored by Perl. Other systems can't control that, and need a
totally devious construct that will work under any of csh, sh, or Perl,
such as the following:
eval '(exit $?0)' && eval 'exec /usr/bin/perl -wS $0 ${1+"$@"}'
& eval 'exec /usr/bin/perl -wS $0 $argv:q'
if $running_under_some_shell;
dump() operator instead. Note: availability of
undump is platform specific and may not be available for a specific port of Perl.
It has been superseded by the new perl-to-C compiler, which is more
portable, even though it's still only considered beta.
$^W variable) must be used along with this option to actually generate the taint-check warnings.
You can disable specific warnings using __WARN__ hooks, as described in the perlvar manpage and warn. See also the perldiag manpage and the perltrap manpage.
__END__ if there is trailing garbage to be ignored (the script can process any or all of the trailing garbage via the
DATA filehandle if desired).
use lib "/my/directory";
BEGIN { require 'perl5db.pl' }
system(). Default is
cmd.exe /x/c
on WindowsNT and command.com /c on Windows95. The value is considered to be space delimited. Precede any
character that needs to be protected (like a space or backslash) with a
backslash.
Note that Perl doesn't use COMSPEC for this purpose because COMSPEC has a high degree of variability among users, leading to portability concerns. Besides, perl can use a shell that may not be fit for interactive use, and setting COMSPEC to such a shell may interfere with the proper functioning of other programs (which usually look in COMSPEC to find a shell fit for interactive use).
perl -V:d_mymalloc is 'define'). If set, this causes memory statistics to be dumped after
execution. If set to an integer greater than one, also causes memory
statistics to be dumped after compilation.
Perl also has environment variables that control how Perl handles data specific to particular natural languages. See the perllocale manpage.
Apart from these, Perl uses no other environment variables, except to make them available to the script being executed, and to child processes. However, scripts running setuid would do well to execute the following lines before doing anything else, just to keep people honest:
$ENV{PATH} = '/bin:/usr/bin'; # or whatever you need
$ENV{SHELL} = '/bin/sh' if exists $ENV{SHELL};
delete @ENV{qw(IFS CDPATH ENV BASH_ENV)};
If rather than formatting bugs, you encounter substantive content errors in these documents, such as mistakes in the explanations or code, please use the perlbug utility included with the Perl distribution.