READ THIS DOCUMENT COMPLETELY.  IT CONTAINS CRITICAL INFORMATION,
INCLUDING THE ALL-IMPORTANT 'HOW TO INSTALL' INSTRUCTIONS.

April 3, 1997

Abandon all hope, all ye who enter here.

This is a pleasant, naive, unsuspecting version of Perl for OS/2,
hacked brutally into working under DOS (and, because it was easy,
presently available versions of Windows).

This Perl uses a DOS extending library called 'EMX' to make it
work under DOS, and, if pressed into working under Windows, uses
a similar library called 'RSX'.  I have only provided the linked
Perl executable and the RSX.EXE program; the complete libraries,
including source code, are presently available at ftp.leo.com, in
/pub/comp/os/os2/.  The Gnu Public License, under which EMX and
RSX appear, is the file 'Copying' in the installation's bin
directory.

The OS/2 Perl kit is available from CPAN (Comprehensive
Perl Archive Network); see http://www.perl.com/perl for more
information.

This version of Perl is run entirely at your own risk.  It is 
not officially supported.  The author of this document and the
authors of any of the software included in this package hereby
explicitly deny any responsibility for any kind of damage caused
by the use or misuse of anything in this package for any reason.

That said, it seems to work for some things, at least for me.

PROBLEMS:

1.  Dynamically loaded (binary) extensions don't work.

2.  Sockets don't work.

3.  You have to use bat files.

4.  Shell operations may or may not work.  A version of pdksh is
included, as \perl\bin\sh.exe.  Note that many Perl commands 
use the shell quietly (for instance, while trying to glob filenames).

HAVE A SERIOUS PROBLEM?  HOW TO OBTAIN TECHNICAL SUPPORT:

just kidding.  There is no way to obtain technical support for this
release.  Do not send any mail to any e-mail address you may find
in this distribution about problems to this release.  Instead, upgrade
your computer to something that runs an official, supported version
of Perl.  This sounds hard-hearted, but what do you expect for free?

HOW TO INSTALL THIS DISTRIBUTION:

1.  Unzip the distribution with an unzipping utility which understands
long file names and path creation.  For instance, pkunzip and winzip.
Unzip it directly into the root of one of your drives; for example,
unzip it into c:\.  It will create c:\perl, c:\perl\bin, etc., etc.

2.  Edit your autoexec.bat file.  Add the following two lines to the
bottom of your autoexec.bat file, _exactly_, taking special care to
note the direction of the slashes:

path %PATH%;C:\PERL\BIN
set perllib_prefix=f:/perllib c:/perl

Yes, that really is 'f:/perllib'.  If you have unzipped perl under
some other volume than C:, change the C:s to whatever the drive
letter is.

3.  Re-exec your autoexec.bat, or reboot, or whatever you need to
do to get those lines included in your environment.

4.  You are done.  Enjoy your fine version of Perl 5.003_93!


FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS:

1.  Who do I call for support?

Nobody.  This is a distribution of last resort, and is totally
unsupported.  Send no mail.  Post no newsgroup queries.  It's
that unsupported.

2.  But it doesn't work, and I need DOS Perl!

Your only recourse is to port Perl yourself.

3.  I have a Perl problem which is definitely not related to this
distribution, but rather to a language feature which is known to
exist on a non-DOS Perl installation.

That's different.  Perl as a language is highly supported.  See
http://www.perl.com/perl for details.

4.  What are all these 'CMD' files?

They're Perl programs gussied up as OS/2 scripts.  You can try
running them by typing 'perl whatever.cmd', or, if you care enough,
you can convert them into a DOS-style .bat file.  The execution of
such is left as an exercise for the reader.

Note that many of the CMD files in the bin directory won't work,
as sockets don't work.

5.  Will there ever be an upgrade to this distribution of DOS-ized
OS/2 Perl?

Not from me.  The intent of this release is to provide as much
Perl 5 functionality to the DOS platform as I could in less than
15 minutes of my time.  My fifteen minutes are over. :)

Good luck!
