[BlueOnyx:12911] Re: perl question

[Michael Stauber]

Hi Tim,

> I have a program that was built on perl 5.14 something
> It Errors on my 5106R (perl ver v5.8.8)
> It does run on my  5108R  (perl ver v5.10.1)
> 
> I looked over at solarspped for perl upgrades but didn't see any.
> 
> How do you all deal with upgrading PERL?

We don't. Really. Perl updates are a thing of the past. Back in the 90's
it was a common thing to do. But that's pretty much it.

I do a lot of Perl programming and in the last 10 years I haven't even
remotely had the inclination nor need to upgrade Perl on any box. Which
isn't trivial to begin with either. You usually end up breaking a lot of
things that you weren't even remotely thinking of.

I'd rather suggest to take a long hard look at the error message, Google
it to see what others with that error did to resolve it. Maybe your
permissions and ownerships are wrong? Maybe the script expects a Perl
module that's present on 5.14 and 5.10, but not in 5.8.8? It's probably
something rather trivial. Or wring the neck of the developer of that
script a bit and see what pe(a)rls of wisdom he has to offer. ;-)

If you really, really, really need a more modern Perl, you could try this:

http://www.activestate.com/activeperl/downloads

They offer a Perl-5.16.3, which can be installed either as a replacement
of your onboard Perl (which I would *strongly* advise against!). Better
tell the installer to install the new Perl in a different location. Such
as /home/perl. That would then simply require that you change the first
line in your Perl script to the location of the new Perl interpreter
instead of just using ...

#!/usr/bin/perl

... as first line in the script you'd use something like this:

#!/home/perl/bin/perl

All the existing scripts would continue to use the "stock" Perl, but
selected scripts of yours could utilize the newer Perl instead.

But like said: I'd be surprised if the problem you have can't be fixed
without replacing Perl. At the worst you might have to add or update
some Perl modules via CPAN:

perl -MCPAN -e 'shell'

That drops you into a CPAN shell and allows you to check for Perl
related updates directly from cpan.org and you can also add, update or
remove Perl modules.

-- 
With best regards

Michael Stauber