rbutcher has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Novice monk here again.. please can somebody tell me what .al and .ph files are for ? I found a lot of them in the pre-installed Perl5.8.3 library that came with Mandrake10. I got the Camel book, so if you tell me what they are I can read up on the background.
thanks. Rod

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Re: What are .ph and .al files for ?
by Zaxo (Archbishop) on Aug 12, 2004 at 03:13 UTC

    .ph files are produced from C header files by the h2ph utility. They are perl files which have #defines, constants and whatever else perl may use translated into perl. The are important for using the syscall builtin.

    .al files are produced by AutoSplit and used by AutoLoader. They also contain small perl wrappers for library calls.

    After Compline,
    Zaxo

      Thanks Zaxo, I can now read up on what's going on there.
      Okay, I installed all the modules I need and ran h2ph in /usr/lib.
      If displays require '_h2ph_pre.ph'; and no warnings 'redefine'; then hangs.
      ????????? I can't find any explanations online, there seem to have been packages referring to it in RPMFind in the past but the links are dead.
        It's not hanging. It's waiting for you to type something because you ran it with no arguments and it defaults to reading from STDIN. If you want to convert C header files you should
        • be in /usr/include
        • run "h2ph *"
        Running "man h2ph" would have told you this.