WELCOME to Plan 9 Perl, brave soul! This is a preliminary alpha version of Plan 9 Perl. Still to be implemented are MakeMaker and DynaLoader. Many perl commands are missing or currently behave in an inscrutable manner. These gaps will, with perserverance and a modicum of luck, be remedied in the near future.To install this software: 1. Create the source directories and libraries for perl by running the setup.rc command in the same directory as this README file. Note: the setup routine assumes that you haven't dearchived these files into /sys/src/cmd/perl. After running setup.rc you may delete the copy of the source you originally detarred, as source code has now been installed in /sys/src/cmd/perl. If you plan on installing perl binaries for all architectures, run "setup.rc -a". After 2. Making sure that you have adequate privileges to build system software, from /sys/src/cmd/perl/5.00301 run: mk install If you wish to install perl versions for all architectures (68020, mips, sparc and 386) run: mk installall 3. Wait. The build process will take a *long* time because perl bootstraps itself. A 75MHz Pentium, 16MB RAM machine takes roughly 30 minutes to build the distribution from scratch. INSTALLING DOCUMENTATION 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 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. For information specific to Plan 9 Perl, try: man perlplan9 (Note: "mk man" may produce some extraneous noise. Fear not.) Direct questions, comments, and the unlikely bug report (ahem) direct comments toward: lutherh@stratcom.com Luther Huffman Strategic Computer Solutions, Inc.