Useful tools for VMS Perl users

There are several tools that can make your life enourmously easier when building and patching Perl. In addition to the various required archivers (ZIP, Gunzip, and VMSTar), you can make life easier with these packages:

Diff

VMS comes with a Diff command, however this diff does one thing that VMS' doesn't--context diffs. A context diff provides pretty much the same information as VMS diff does, however it has several features that VMS diff lacks. It shows both the lines added and the lines taken away in the changed file The file being changed is included in the output The output is distinctive enough for a program to add or remove any lines indicated in the output It's the accepted method of providing changes to Perl source on the Perl5-Porters mailing list

Patch

Patch is the opposite of diff. It takes the context diffs produced by diff (The one above, not VMS' diff) and applies them. Patch is fairly clever. Not only can it apply multiple patches in the same file (if, for example, you get a mail message ith patches to eight or ten files included in it), it is clever enough to still apply the changes if the file you have is slightly different from the one the patch works against. Patch is also clever enough to unapply patches if you need to back them out for some reason. (Like they don't work)