Learning Perl on Win32 Systems

Standard Modules

The following is a list of all Perl pragmas and modules included with the current Perl distribution (version 5.004). Modules new to 5.004 are italicized. The classification of the modules is admittedly arbitrary, and not all of them are applicable to Windows NT systems.

General Programming: Miscellaneous

autouse

Defers loading of a module until it’s used

constant

Creates compile-time constants

Benchmark

Checks and compares running times of code

Config

Accesses Perl configuration information

Env

Imports environment variables

English

Uses English or awk names for punctuation variables

FindBin

Finds path of currently executing program

Getopt::Long

Provides extended processing of command-line options

Getopt::Std

Processes single-character switches with switch clustering

lib

Manipulates @INC at compile time

Shell

Runs shell commands transparently within Perl

strict

Restricts unsafe constructs

Symbol

Generates anonymous globs; qualifies variable names

subs

Predeclares subroutine names

vars

Predeclares global variable names

General Programming: Error Handling and Logging

Carp

Generates error messages

diagnostics

Forces verbose warning diagnostics

sigtrap

Enables stack backtrace on unexpected signals

Sys::Syslog

Provides Perl interface to UNIX syslog (3) calls

General Programming: File Access and Handling

Cwd

Gets pathname of current working directory

DirHandle

Supplies object methods for directory handles

Fcntl

Loads the C Fcntl.h defines

File::Basename

Parses file specifications ...