Sams Teach Yourself Perl in 21 Days, Second Edition

Do You Need to Install Perl?

Unless you're running on your own personal Unix system where you're the owner and the only person on it, chances are really good that you don't need to install Perl at all. It would be odd if Perl hadn't already installed because it is so useful to Unix system administrators. From your Unix system prompt, try this first:

% perl
						-v
					

If you get a message that says This is perl, v5.6.0 built for sun4-solaris or some such, you're set. Stop here, and go directly to Day 1, “An Introduction to Perl,” to start working with Perl.

If you get a message that says perl: command not found, or if you get the proper version message, but it says something like This is perl, version 4, then things are going to be tougher. It means ...