perlplan9 - Man Page

Perl is invoked from the command line as described in  perl. Most perl scripts, however, do have a first line  such as "#!/usr/local/bin/perl". This is known as a shebang  (shell-bang) statement and tells the OS shell where to find  the perl interpreter. In Plan 9 Perl this statement should be  "#!/bin/perl" if you wish to be able to directly invoke the  script by its name.
    Alternatively, you may invoke perl with the command "Perl" instead of "perl". This will produce Acme-friendly error messages of the form "filename:18".

Some scripts, usually identified with a *.PL extension, are  self-configuring and are able to correctly create their own  shebang path from config information located in Plan 9  Perl. These you won't need to be worried about.

Although Plan 9 Perl currently only  provides static  loading, it is built with a number of useful extensions.  These include Opcode, FileHandle, Fcntl, and POSIX. Expect  to see others (and DynaLoading!) in the future.

As mentioned previously, dynamic loading isn't currently  available nor is MakeMaker. Both are high-priority items.

Some, such as chown and umask aren't provided  because the concept does not exist within Plan 9. Others, such as some of the socket-related functions, simply haven't been written yet. Many in the latter category  may be supported in the future.

The functions not currently implemented include:

    chown, chroot, dbmclose, dbmopen, getsockopt, 
    setsockopt, recvmsg, sendmsg, getnetbyname, 
    getnetbyaddr, getnetent, getprotoent, getservent, 
    sethostent, setnetent, setprotoent, setservent, 
    endservent, endnetent, endprotoent, umask

There may be several other functions that have undefined  behavior so this list shouldn't be considered complete.

For compatibility with perl scripts written for the Unix  environment, Plan 9 Perl uses the POSIX signal emulation provided in Plan 9's ANSI POSIX Environment (APE). Signal stacking isn't supported. The signals provided are:

    SIGHUP, SIGINT, SIGQUIT, SIGILL, SIGABRT,
    SIGFPE, SIGKILL, SIGSEGV, SIGPIPE, SIGPIPE, SIGALRM, 
    SIGTERM, SIGUSR1, SIGUSR2, SIGCHLD, SIGCONT,
    SIGSTOP, SIGTSTP, SIGTTIN, SIGTTOU

This perl distribution comes with a tremendous amount of documentation. To add these to the built-in manuals that come with Plan 9, from /sys/src/cmd/perl/5.00301 (adjust version appropriately) run:

        mk man

To begin your reading, start with:

        man perl

This is a good introduction and will direct you towards other man pages that may interest you.

(Note: "mk man" may produce some extraneous noise. Fear not.)