Perl in a Nutshell, 2nd Edition

Chapter 22. Win32 Modules and Extensions

If you use Perl on a Win32 system, a number of extension modules are available to provide Windows-specific functionality. Extension modules consist of a regular module written in Perl and a library written in C or C++ that can implement native Windows calls. The core of available modules is bundled together as lib-win32 on CPAN, and with ActivePerl, Activestate’s version of Perl for Win32. They provide such functionality as managing Windows processes, NT user administration, registry modification, and OLE automation.

The Win32 modules were originally written for Windows NT systems, so much of the functionality of the Win32 library is applicable only to Perl running on Windows NT. Many modules check to see which system they are on before installing. Many of the NT-specific modules such as NetAdmin and EventLog do not install at all on Windows 95. Modules such as Registry do their best to work on both systems, despite the differences in their registries.

This chapter covers most of the modules and extensions included in lib-win32 and distributed with ActivePerl. Additional Windows modules are available at CPAN.

The following modules are described in this chapter:

Win32::Clipboard

Provides Windows clipboard interaction

Win32::Console

Provides Windows console interaction

Win32::ChangeNotify

Creates and uses ChangeNotify objects

Win32::EventLog

Reads from and writes to the Windows NT event log

Win32::File

Manages file attributes (read-only, system, hidden, ...