in reply to Re: Relocatable Perl 5.10.0 on Solaris
in thread Relocatable Perl 5.10.0 on Solaris

Unfortunately, the box is solaris 8, not 10 - and there doesn't seem to be a /proc/self/path/a.out symlink.

I haven't (so far) been able to find anything I could use in place of /proc/self/exe either.

Thanks for you help so far almut, I have to say I'm finding the level of support here outstanding.

  • Comment on Re^2: Relocatable Perl 5.10.0 on Solaris

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Re^3: Relocatable Perl 5.10.0 on Solaris
by almut (Canon) on May 16, 2008 at 19:11 UTC
    Unfortunately, the box is solaris 8, not 10 ...

    I was afraid you were going to say that :) — in this case you're essentially out of luck...

    On anything older than Solaris 10, the proc filesystem is rather limited. AFAIK, the only info remotely similar to /proc/self/exe (or /proc/self/path/a.out for that matter), is in /proc/self/auxv (aux vector — a binary structure), but it's not really the same, in particular on Solaris 8 (things have gotten somewhat better starting with Solaris 9).

    If you're really determined, you could try to hack up something based on the standard C library functions getexecname, which extracts the appropriate structure from /proc/self/auxv, together with realpath, which resolves all "..", "." and symbolic links in a path (, and possibly also getcwd).

    One ugly problem with getexecname on Solaris 8 is that it doesn't make a distinction between an executable script and its associated interpreter invoked via the shebang line. For example, with the following naive snippet

    #include <stdlib.h> #include <limits.h> #include <stdio.h> int main() { const char *execname; char *execpath; char pathbuf[PATH_MAX]; execname = getexecname(); execpath = realpath(execname, pathbuf); printf("execname: %s\n", execname); printf("realpath: %s\n", execpath); }

    if you compile this with cc foo.c -o foo and put the resulting binary in - let's say - /home/ck/bin/, and then create a dummy script bar with the shebang line #!/home/ck/bin/foo in some other directory like /home/ck/myscripts/, and call it from there, you'd get on Solaris 8:

    $ ./bar execname: bar realpath: /home/ck/myscripts/bar

    while on Solaris 9 or 10, the execname would be more useful

    $ ./bar execname: /home/ck/bin/foo realpath: /home/ck/bin/foo

    You see the problem with Solaris 8 — and this is not the only one...

    (note that the code would of course have to be linked into perl (to set $^X), i.e. the foo in the example represents the Perl binary)

      You see the problem with Solaris 8 — and this is not the only one...

      Yep - I can see that. I'd have to conclude that there's no sane way of getting relocatable perl working on Solaris 8. :(

      I suppose we could recurse the PATH environment variable to find the first instance of perl to set $^X. Seems awfully hacky though.

      Thanks again for your thorough help on this!