CHAPTER 127. PERLWIN32 127.3. BUGS AND CAVEATS 127.3 BUGS AND CAVEATS Norton AntiVirus interferes with the build process, particularly if set to "AutoProtect, All Files, when Opened". Unlike large applications the perl build process opens and modifies a lot of files. Having the the AntiVirus scan each and every one slows build the process significantly. Worse, with PERLIO = stdio the build process fails with peculiar messages as the virus checker interacts badly with miniperl.exe writing configure files (it seems to either catch file part written and treat it as suspicious, or virus checker may have it "locked" in a way which inhibits miniperl updating it). The build does complete with set PERLIO=perlio but that may be just luck. Other AntiVirus software may have similar issues. Some of the built-in functions do not act exactly as documented in perlfunc , and a few are not implemented at all. To avoid surprises, particularly if you have had prior exposure to Perl in other operating environments or if you intend to write code that will be portable to other environments. See perlport for a reasonably definitive list of these di ff erences. Not all extensions available from CPAN may build or work properly in the Win32 environment. See § ?? . Most socket() related calls are supported, but they may not behave as on Unix platforms. See perlport for the full list. Signal handling may not behave as on Unix platforms (where it doesn’t exactly "behave", either :). For instance, calling die() or exit() from signal handlers will cause an exception, since most implementations of signal() on Win32 are severely crippled. Thus, signals may work only for simple things like setting a flag variable in the handler. Using signals under this port should currently be considered unsupported. Please send detailed descriptions of any problems and solutions that you may find to < perlbug@perl.com > , along with the output produced by perl -V . The use of a camel with the topic of Perl is a trademark of O’Reilly and Associates, Inc. Used with permission. This document is maintained by Gurusamy Sarathy. perl This port was originally contributed by Gary Ng around 5.003_24, and borrowed from the Hip Communications port that was available at the time. Various people have made numerous and sundry hacks since then. Borland support was added in 5.004_01 (Gurusamy Sarathy). GCC / mingw32 support was added in 5.005 (Nick Ing-Simmons). Support for PERL_OBJECT was added in 5.005 (ActiveState Tool Corp). Support for fork() emulation was added in 5.6 (ActiveState Tool Corp). Win9x support was added in 5.6 (Benjamin Stuhl). Support for 64-bit Windows added in 5.8 (ActiveState Corp). Last updated: 20 April 2002 1658 127.7 HISTORY 127.6 SEE ALSO 127.5 AUTHORS 127.4 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Gary Ng < 71564.1743@CompuServe.COM > Gurusamy Sarathy < gsar@activestate.com > Nick Ing-Simmons < nick@ing-simmons.net >