perl vs iwperl

Hi,

I read somewhere that use perl interpreter to run tspostreboot.pl script not iwperl. I am interested in knowing why so?

Thanks
S. Muthu Ganesh

Find more posts tagged with

Comments

Adam Stoller

Hi,

I read somewhere that use perl interpreter to run tspostreboot.pl script not iwperl. I am interested in knowing why so?

Thanks
S. Muthu Ganesh

Do you know where you read this? I don't recall ever reading or heading this and I generally use iwperl when running the script - in fact, for a TS server - iwperl is all you can count on being installed to run the script, there can be no assumption of any other version of perl being present.

Migrateduser

This can't be correct because more often than not, on a Windows system at least, you'll have only the iwperl interpreter installed. Therefore, any OOTB script that relies on an additional instance of Perl would not be

reliable.

smg

Hi,

I read this in Interwoven Boot Camp Session for TeamSite 6.5 System Administration.

Here the exact statement goes:
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
..... you must run the tspostreboot.pl script in iw-home\install: iw-home\iw-perl\bin\perl iw-home\install\tspostreboot.pl iw-home IIS .....

..... Note that in the command above, you are running the Perl interpreter (not iwperl) to run the tspostreboot.pl script .....
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Thanks
S. Muthu Ganesh

jbonifaci

That is likely a documentation bug. It wouldn't be the first time, Smiley Wink

Adam Stoller

I read this in Interwoven Boot Camp Session for TeamSite 6.5 System Administration.

Here the exact statement goes:
..... you must run the tspostreboot.pl script in iw-home\install: iw-home\iw-perl\bin\perl iw-home\install\tspostreboot.pl iw-home IIS .....

..... Note that in the command above, you are running the Perl interpreter (not iwperl) to run the tspostreboot.pl script .....

I'd have to agree that this must be an [unfortunate] mistake in the documentation.

On Windows:
- perl.exe
- perl5.8.2.exe
- iwperl.exe
- iwperl5.8.2.exe
are all copies of the same file.

On Unix:
- iwperl is a symlink to perl
- iwperl5.8.2 is a symlink to perl5.8.2
- perl5.8.2 shares a hardlink with iwperl5.8.2
In other words - they're all the same file.

Migrateduser

The note in the training course is refering to a syntax example on the same page, which shows tspostreboot.pl being executed by iw-home/iw-perl/bin/perl, which is exactly how the TS install documentation shows it. If you have a look in iw-home/iw-perl/bin you'll find both perl and iwperl executables, as ghoti points out. (We only care about Windows here, as UNIX does not have a tspostreboot.pl.) In our TS install docs, tspostreboot.pl is shown as being executed by the perl (not iwperl) binary in iw-home/iw-perl/bin. That, and the fact that the script has a .pl instead of .ipl extension, convinced me back when I wrote the TS 4.5 system admin course in 2001 or so to use the doc example as-is in the training guide. I assumed that there was some minor and uninteresting difference between the two interpreters, and I assumed that there was some good reason for this specific example of the use of perl instead of iwperl during install, so I included a note to point out that the perl.exe interpreter was being used. Perhaps I shouldn't have made that assumption, but at the time it seemed harmless, and has never been challenged by any engineering review of the course since 2001. (That's not to say they ever saw the note, though.)

Since this came up this morning, I took the time to fire up a TS 6.5 VM and ran perl -V and iwperl -V. They both come up with identical configurations, so ghoti's right as far as I can tell: iwperl and perl (in iw-perl/bin) are the same.

On the other hand, perl -V for a system with ActiveState Perl (the one most likely to be found on a windows machine) was completely different, so our best-practice recommendation remains: don't put any other variant of Perl on your system besides the one built-in to TS.

So: in all likelyhood, on a TS machine you can run tspostreboot.pl with the TS-supplied perl *or* iwperl compiler in iw-perl/bin. In fact, I note that the comment help doc inside tspostreboot.pl shows that it should be executed with iwperl, in contradiction to the install guide--first time I've noticed that.

OTOH, all bets are off if you use a different (non-TS) Perl interpreter.

At any rate, I'll enter a doc bug for the TS Windows install guide, and we'll see what engineering says. If, as we suspect, there is no difference between iwperl and perl, I'll remove the note about the use of perl instead of iwperl in the training guide.

bw