Perl in a Nutshell

Installing Perl

Most likely your system administrator is responsible for installing and upgrading Perl. But if you are the system administrator, or you want to install Perl on your own system, sooner or later you will find yourself installing a new version of Perl.

Note

If you have been running Perl, and you are now going to install Perl 5.005, you need to be aware that it is not binary-compatible with older versions. This means that you must rebuild and reinstall any dynamically loaded extensions that you built under earlier versions.

Specific installation instructions come in the README and INSTALL files of the Perl distribution kit. If you don’t already have the Perl distribution, you can download it from CPAN—the latest Unix distribution is in latest.tar.gz. The information in this section is an overview of the installation process. The gory details are in the INSTALL file, which you should look at before starting, especially if you haven’t done an installation before. Note that operating systems other than Unix may have special instructions; if so, follow those instructions instead of what’s in this section or in INSTALL. Look for a file named README.xxx, where xxx is your OS name.

In addition to Perl itself, the standard distribution includes a set of core modules that are automatically installed with Perl. See Section 2.4 later in this chapter for how to install modules that are not bundled with Perl; Chapter 8, describes the standard modules in some detail.

Installing on ...