Notes on MS-DOS Perl Len Reed September, 1991 Note: the documentation relating to using MS-DOS perl has been incorporated into the main manual. See the section below on the manual. Copying ------- MS-DOS perl may be distributed under the terms of the Gnu public license or the artistic license. You should have received copies of the files License and Artistic. Warranty -------- This is free software. It comes with no warranty of any kind. Obtaining the Source Code ------------------------- The standard perl source may be obtained from numerous public archive sources, and is available for anonymous ftp from . The MS-DOS changes incorporated into this version are not yet publically available, but should be soon. Carriage-Return/Line-feed Fixup ------------------------------- This package has been back and forth from Unix to MS-DOS many times. If your MS-DOS text files, e.g., a manual or batch file, are missing the carriage returns, the following will insert them: a perl -i.bak -pe ";" file [file ...] The ";" is a null perl script, the fixup is accomplished by reading a text file (which converts CR/LF ==> LF but passes LFs unmolested) and writing it (which converts LF==>CR/LF). Functionality ------------- Several standard perl commands are not supported by MS-DOS perl for this simple reason that MS-DOS does not support many basic Unix functions like fork(), pipe(), and wait(). Use of these functions and many other like them will result in a fatal error. See the manual for details. All text processing features are intact. The other limiting factor in using MS-DOS perl is memory. The executable takes over 300 K-bytes before it starts calling malloc(). And it loves to call malloc(). You'll need 640K. An 80286 with MS-DOS 5.0 running in high memory will help. If you have an 80386 perl will find and use "upper memory" if available. (Refer to Microsoft's documentation on XMS and MS-DOS 5.0.) Subprocesses are always run to completion, since MS-DOS doesn't support multi-tasking. Pipes are emulated by using temporary files. MS-DOS perl can swap itself to disk (ideally a RAM disk in extended or expanded memory) so that the subprocess has space to run. MS-DOS perl is compatible with the MKS toolkit: it can pass and receive extended argument lists to/from MKS tools. To read and write binary files, use the binmode command. (See the manual.) The chdir function has been enhanced to allow changing the drive and/or the directory. The Gnu version of dbm (gdbm) has been added to MS-DOS perl. The perl debugger works as described in the manual, but it takes a lot of memory, so you won't be able to use it to debug any complicated. (Bit of a Catch-22, I'm afraid.) Things To Do ------------ The globbing for non-MKS users is pretty bad: the Microsoft globbing routines are used, and they're pretty primitive. Some users have expressed an interest in 4DOS argument-passing compatibility. Network communication (sockets) is not implemented. There's a need for a freely distributable sockets library that works with a variety of network cards. The exec() function is poorly implemented. Without forks it's not too useful, and hence the considerable work required to make it function properly has been repeatedly put off. MS-DOS perl takes too much memory. There's a lot of code that doesn't do anything useful under MS-DOS but that is nevertheless compiled in. I'm convinced that the exec-swapping code is not general enough for the worst case. (That code was adapted from Dennis Vadura's dmake program.) There may also be some memory leakage due to bugs in Microsoft's malloc library code. For the truly ambitious, perl could be ported to gcc for i386 MS- DOS. It could then run in 32-bit mode with large amounts of memory. That would be a big project and really should use this port only as a basepoint: it should remain separate. Any takers? :-) See also Wishlist.dds. The Perl Manual --------------- If you got this file as part of the complete perl source distribution, you can make one of three manuals from the n/troff manual source: the standard Unix manual, an MS-DOS manual, or a combined Unix/MS-DOS manual. Near the top of that file there's a string register that gets set to 'unix', 'msdos', or 'both'. The 'unix' version has little mention of MS-DOS, the 'both' version includes additional commentary on MS-DOS and a section on "MS-DOS Considerations." The 'msdos' version omits large sections of the standard manual that are not relevant to MS-DOS: every command is mentioned, but many simply note that they are not supported on MS-DOS. If you got this file as part of an MS-DOS executable kit, you should have received a formatted manual in that kit: perldos.man. This manual contains simple highlighting in the form of boldface and underlining accomplished by backspacing. There is a one-line script in the eg directory (nohigh.bat) that will remove the highlighting. perl -p eg/nohigh.bat perldos.man > perldos.van This will create perldos.van without highlighting. Only the perl.exe file is needed for this script; it doesn't require a full installation of perl. The versions of the manual that include MS-DOS commentary are not major re-writes; many of the examples have Unixisms that won't work on MS-DOS without some changes. Beware that the "Camel" book, the only text on perl, barely mentions MS-DOS. Nevertheless, this book should prove useful to the MS-DOS perl programmer. Installing MS-DOS Perl ---------------------- Put perl.exe into a directory in your PATH. Put perlglob.exe into that directory, too. (Not needed for MKS users.) If you wish to use the -P switch, copy doscpp.pl to a library directory. (If you don't have Microsoft C 6.0 you'll have to edit this file.) If you want to use the perl debugger, copy perldb.pl to the library directory, too. Set up your environment as explained in the manual. Building MS-DOS Perl from the Source ------------------------------------ This code will compile only on Microsoft C, 5.0, 5.1, or 6.0. The last of these produces the best code. (It may be possible to cross-compile from SCO Xenix or Unix, since these cross-compilers are close relatives of the Microsoft compilers.) The makefile is specific to Dennis Vadura's dmake program; if you don't have this, get it. (See the makefile for the ftp address.) There are batch files build5.bat and build6.bat to build perl.exe with Microsoft C 5.x and 6.0, respectively, if you don't have dmake. If you wish to include gdbm, you'll have to obtain it. Be sure to get the MS-DOS version. I used version 1.4, with MS-DOS patches by Thorsten Ohl . Build the library (LGDBM.LIB) and copy it to the directory with the compiler libraries. Copy the files "ndbm.h" and "gdbmdefs.h" to the compiler include file directory. Enable the GDBM option in the makefile or edit the batch script or the config.h file to define HAS_NDBM. Do not copy any other gdbm header files: in particular, "extern.h" will conflict with perl's extern.h. Don't run Configure for MS-DOS: a pre-made config.h file is found in the msdos subdirectory. Edit the makefile at the top to select the options you need. (Or edit the batch file, using the makefile as a guide.) The makefile will attempt to run BISON to create perly.c and perly.h from perly.y. You can instead import your Unix-made version of these files. (These are independent of platform, so you don't need to do anything to the Unix versions. If using Unix yacc, be sure to copy over the version that had perlyfixer.sh run against it.) Build perl.exe in the msdos subdirectory. You'll need free XMS memory to run the Microsoft Codeview debugger on perl. Running the Test Suite ---------------------- This section applies only if you're building MS-DOS perl from the source. The test suite has been altered to run under MS-DOS. Tests that aren't relevant under MS-DOS are if'ed around, so all tests should pass. You'll need a lot of Unix-like tools (e.g., rm); I used the MKS toolkit. Copy perl.exe into the "t" directory. Set up the environment and install doscpp.pl. You can't just run "perl test" since you'll run out of memory. Try running each directory of tests, e.g., ./perl test base/*.t" It may be necessary to break this even finer, some of the directories have a lot of tests. History of MS-DOS Perl ---------------------- Larry Wall wrote perl, and continues to enhance it. While he has done no direct work on MS-DOS perl, most of the code in MS-DOS perl is his since most of the code concerns portable features. Perl was originally ported to MS-DOS by Diomidis Spinellis. His code was distributed with version 3, patch level 18 (3.018). This was in April, 1990. Len Reed's executable version based upon 3.041 source with considerable enhancements was posted to USENET comp.binaries.ibm.pc in November, 1990. This version included considerable minor bug fixes, swapping to disk while running subprocesses, "smarter" subprocesses (i.e., don't use COMMAND.COM if you don't need it), MKS toolkit compatibility, support for the -P switch, enhanced chdir semantics, and enhanced support for the -i switch. (The last two of these due to Tom Dinger.) Tom Dinger cleaned up the released MS-DOS source code after perl 4.x came out. By 4.010, he had put the following into the standard sources: enhanced chdir, enhanced -i support, several bug fixes. He also created the msdos/config.h file. In September 1991, I (Len Reed) added the functions that were in my 3.041 version that hadn't been incorporated into the standard 4.010 source: notably swapping, smarter subprocesses, support for -P, and MKS compatibility. I fixed some minor bugs. I added gdbm support. I altered the test suite to work with MS-DOS. I put MS-DOS support into the main manual and reworked the other documentation, including this file. The Authors ----------- Larry Wall Diomidis Spinellis Len Reed Tom Dinger The address for Diomidis Spinellis may be out of date.