Perl Archive Toolkit

PAR is a toolkit to create and use perl scripts and modules stored inside compressed .par files. http://par.perl.org/ is the official PAR website.

• http://use.perl.org/articles/02/11/02/224205.shtml?tid=5
• http://search.cpan.org/src/AUTRIJUS/PAR-0.90/README
• http://search.cpan.org/~autrijus/PAR-0.90/script/pp

pp creates standalone executables from Perl programs, using the compressed packager provided by PAR, and dependency detection heuristics offered by Module::ScanDeps. Source files are compressed verbatim without compilation.

You may think of pp as "perlcc that works without hassle".

A GUI interface is also available as the tkpp command.

It does not provide the compilation-step acceleration provided by perlcc (however, see -f below for byte-compiled, source-hiding techniques), but makes up for it with better reliability, smaller executable size, and full retrieval of original source code.

http://search.cpan.org/dist/PAR/lib/PAR/Tutorial.pod

* Typical Usage

Here are some recipes showing how to utilize pp to bundle source.pl with all its dependencies, on target machines with different expected settings:

- Stand-alone setup

    % pp -o packed.exe source.pl   # makes packed.exe
    # Now, deploy 'packed.exe' to target machine...
    $ packed.exe         # run it

- Perl interpreter only, without core modules:

    % pp -B -p source.pl      # makes source.par
    % par.pl -B -Opacked.pl source.par  # makes packed.pl
    # Now, deploy 'packed.pl' to target machine...
    $ perl packed.pl         # run it

- Perl with core module installed:

    % pp -p source.pl         # makes source.par
    % par.pl -b -Opacked.pl source.par   # makes packed.pl
    # Now, deploy 'packed.pl' to target machine...
    $ perl packed.pl         # run it

- Perl with PAR.pm and its dependencies installed:

    % pp -p source.pl                   # makes source.par
    % echo "use PAR 'source.par';" > packed.pl;
    % cat source.pl >> packed.pl;       # makes packed.pl
    # Now, deploy 'source.par' and 'packed.pl' to target machine...
    $ perl packed.pl                    # run it

-- MartinCleaver - 17 Jan 2006