1.1. What is Perl, and where can I get a ton of information about it?

Perl is a scripting language widely used for system administration and programming on the World Wide Web. It originated in the UNIX community and has a strong UNIX slant, but is still very useful for Win32 platforms. perl (small 'p') is the program used to interpret the Perl language.

To get more information about Perl, check out these WWW URLs:

The main Perl interpreter available for the Win32 platform is Perl for Win32. It was developed by ActiveWare, Inc. (originally Hip Communications) for Microsoft Corporation for inclusion in the Windows NT Resource Kit. It has since taken on a life of its own. When people talk about "Perl for Win32", it is this package that they mean.

The Perl for Win32 package includes perl, PerlIS, and several Win32-specific modules developed by ActiveWare.

The standard perl distribution is mainly geared for UNIX systems. The configuration scripts are in UNIX shell language. It is therefore not a simple task to build perl from the standard distribution.

However, it has been done. Karl Martin Syring has built perl with the GNU-Win32 development system. His port is available at:

The Perl for Win32 package is available as a ZIP archive by anonymous FTP from ActiveWare and from CPAN, the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network.

To download from ActiveWare, look in this directory:

Because the Perl for Win32 package contains long file names (LFNs), normal zip file handlers like PKZip will not open them correctly. [Does the newest version of PKZip handle LFNs correctly? -ESP] You need to get a zip file opener that can work with LFNs, such as:

The source code package includes make files for Visual C++ versions 2.x and 4.x. The following instructions are for Visual C++ 4.x. [Does anyone have instructions for VC++ 2.x? How about other Win32 C++ compilers? -ESP]

The source distribution only includes Intel targets. If you're building for another platform, like DEC Alpha, you may have to fiddle with the build settings to get them to work. [Anyone done this? -ESP]

First, make sure you unzipped the archive correctly into the destination directory. Then, open the perl100.mdp project file in the dll-src subdirectory of your perl directory with Microsoft Developers Studio.

Build the "perl100 - Win32 Perl Intel DLL Release" target (Go have some lunch -- this will take a while). You'll end up with a perl100.dll file in your ntt subdirectory of your perl directory.

Now, open the perl.mdp project file in the exe-src subdirectory of your perl directory. Build the "perl - Win32 Perl Intel Release" target. You also have to build the "perl - Win32 PerlGlob Intel Release" target. These will produce perl.exe and perlglob.exe, respectively, in your ntt directory.

Optionally, you can build the extension files that come with the source distribution. These include:

The last step is running install.bat, a perl program masquerading as a batch file found in your perl directory. Running install.bat will register the perl program and PerlIS with your system, as well as copy the binary files from the ntt subdirectory to the bin subdirectory.

Installing Perl for Win32 adds the following keys to your registry, if they don't already exist:

• HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Resource Kit\PERL5: main registry key
• BIN: path to the perl binaries
• PRIVLIB: path to the library files
• HTML-DOCS: path to the HTML documentation

The BIN and PRIVLIB values are probably used in the perl interpreter to find files for loading. The purpose of the HTML-DOCS value is unclear.

Installing also adds your perl binary path to the PATH variable for your system, as well as "." (current directory), for historical reasons.

You are not able to uninstall Perl for Win32 from the Add/Remove Programs section of the Control Panel (if you have such a section).

In your original perl directory, there is a file called uninstall.bat. Use this to clear out the registry settings created by install.bat.

Yes. On December 4, 1996, ActiveWare released a beta version of PerlScript, an ActiveScripting engine for the Perl language.

Although it's possible to program in batch language or with QBASIC (a 16-bit BASIC interpreter that comes with Windows 95 and Windows NT), serious programmers will probably prefer one of the following other options:

On December 4, 1996, ActiveWare released a beta version of Perl for Win32 at the 5.003 level. It corrects many of the flaws of the 110 build at the 5.001m level. It's available at

Perl for Win32 is a Win32 command-line program. It expects to be run from the command line, not from Explorer.

If you want to run a Perl script, write the script out using a text editor like Notepad. A good starter program is:

    print "Hello, World!\n";

Save the program to a file on your hard disk (such as "C:\temp\hello.pl"). Now, start a command prompt window (sometimes erroneously called a "DOS window"), and type the following line at the command prompt:

    C:\> perl c:\temp\hello.pl

This should print out the words "Hello, World!" on the screen. You may have to do some fiddling with the PATH environment variable, or specify the full path name to perl.exe, in order for this to work.

perl.exe has a lot of nifty command-line arguments that can make your work a lot easier. See the perlrun documentation page for details.

To answer the original question about what's happening when you start perl from an Explorer window rather than a command-line window: starting from Explorer is roughly the same as starting perl without any command line arguments. When perl is started without a script file specified on the command line, it expects to receive a Perl program as standard input, i.e., from the keyboard.

    When I say yes, it says there was an error.  Why?