Errata and Addenda

The Perl book, Programming Perl, has the following omissions and goofs.

• On page 5, the examples which read

  eval '/usr/bin/perl
  

  should read

  eval 'exec /usr/bin/perl
  

• On page 195, the equivalent to the System V sum program only works for very small files. To do larger files, use

  undef $/;
  $checksum = unpack("%32C*",<>) % 32767;
  

• The descriptions of alarm and sleep refer to signal `SIGALARM'. These should refer to `SIGALRM'.
• The `-0' switch to set the initial value of `$/' was added to Perl after the book went to press.
• The `-l' switch now does automatic line ending processing.
• The qx// construct is now a synonym for backticks.
• `$0' may now be assigned to set the argument displayed by ps(1).
• The new `@###.##' format was omitted accidentally from the description on formats.
• It wasn't known at press time that s///ee caused multiple evaluations of the replacement expression. This is to be construed as a feature.
• (LIST) x $count now does array replication.
• There is now no limit on the number of parentheses in a regular expression.
• In double-quote context, more escapes are supported: \e, \a, \x1b, \c[, \l, \L, \u, \U, \E. The latter five control up/lower case translation.
• The `$/' variable may now be set to a multi-character delimiter.
• There is now a `g' modifier on ordinary pattern matching that causes it to iterate through a string finding multiple matches.
• All of the `$^X' variables are new except for `$^T'.
• The default top-of-form format for FILEHANDLE is now FILEHANDLE_TOP rather than top.
• The eval {} and sort {} constructs were added in version 4.018.
• The `v' and `V' (little-endian) template options for pack and unpack were added in 4.019.