Scripting Products

This chapter contains known issues using scripting products with NetWare^® 6 Support Pack 1.

Feature Enhancements

Perl5.003 for NetWare has been upgraded to Perl5.6 for NetWare. Perl5.6 for Netware is based on CPAN version Perl 5.6.1 and contains all the standard Perl extensions (Fcntl, IO, SDBM_File etc.).This also contains Perl2UCS (formerly UCSExt) extension to access UCS components & CGI2perl for web programming.

Perl Issues

Failure of UCX Methods. Failure of UCX methods is indicated by an unknown error. The error description given by the UCX call is currently not available for the Perl script.

Perl2UCS. If a script has just "use Perl2UCS" or "require Perl2UCS" and no object instantiation through "Perl2UCS->new(...)", then the script will abend.

Complex Scripts. Complex scripts running from the console might give the message "Process did not relinquish control frequently."

Infinite Loop. Scripts that contain an infinite loop (for example, as created by a while loop) can be terminated by Ctrl+Z, not Ctrl+C. When Ctrl+Z is pressed, it breaks the loop and expects any key to be pressed (which will be indicated on the Perl output screen) before the Perl output screen can be exited.

Perl Debugger. Press Ctrl+Z after pressing Enter to execute the next command in the Perl debugger.

Fork Method. The fork method is not yet implemented on NetWare.

Limitations. The Perl functions listed below are either not yet implemented on NetWare or are not applicable in the NetWare environment.

alarm	chown	chroot
endgrent	endpwent	fork
getgrent	getgrgid	getgrnam
getpgrp	getppid	getpriority
getpwent	getpwnam	getpwuid
link	rewinddir	setgrent
setpgrp	setpriority	setpwent
symlink	syscall	telldir
times

The 'truncate' built-in procedure does not function reliably.

The built-in procedure 'readlink' always returns an undefined value. According to Perl's definition of the function, this is the correct behavior on a system such as NetWare that does not support symbolic links.

The 'system' built-in procedure is supported. However, the "shell" it invokes is the standard NetWare console. Note that the console does not support I/O redirection, pipes, variable expansion, or filename globbing. This is a port of Perl, not Unix.

PERL_ROOT Setting. Earlier web server settings had PERL_ROOT set to sys:\novonyx\suitespot\docs folder for the Perl 5.003 release. This should be changed to sys:\perl\web for the current Perl 5.6 release. This modification provides a common setting for multiple web servers in addition to security.

Multiple CGI Scripts Abend. When multiple CGI scripts (more than about 40) are each doing complex operations and are run simultaneously, the web server will hang or abend.