=head1 NAME

perlfaq3 - Programming Tools ($Revision: 1.38 $, $Date: 1999/05/23 16:08:30 $)

=head1 DESCRIPTION

This section of the FAQ answers questions related to programmer tools
and programming support.

=head2 How do I do (anything)?

Have you looked at CPAN (see L<perlfaq2>)?  The chances are that
someone has already written a module that can solve your problem.
Have you read the appropriate man pages?  Here's a brief index:

	Basics	        perldata, perlvar, perlsyn, perlop, perlsub
	Execution	perlrun, perldebug
	Functions	perlfunc
	Objects		perlref, perlmod, perlobj, perltie
	Data Structures	perlref, perllol, perldsc
	Modules		perlmod, perlmodlib, perlsub
	Regexes		perlre, perlfunc, perlop, perllocale
	Moving to perl5	perltrap, perl
	Linking w/C	perlxstut, perlxs, perlcall, perlguts, perlembed
	Various 	http://www.perl.com/CPAN/doc/FMTEYEWTK/index.html
			(not a man-page but still useful)

A crude table of contents for the Perl man page set is found in L<perltoc>.

=head2 How can I use Perl interactively?

The typical approach uses the Perl debugger, described in the
perldebug(1) man page, on an ``empty'' program, like this:

    perl -de 42

Now just type in any legal Perl code, and it will be immediately
evaluated.  You can also examine the symbol table, get stack
backtraces, check variable values, set breakpoints, and other
operations typically found in symbolic debuggers.

=head2 Is there a Perl shell?

In general, no.  The Shell.pm module (distributed with Perl) makes
Perl try commands which aren't part of the Perl language as shell
commands.  perlsh from the source distribution is simplistic and
