I've been working on this for several months off and on, have read 40+ sites from Google searches, and I'm still stumped. I don't care what type of Perl I use, but Strawberry Perl and ActiveState just doesn't work for me to make an exe file from my perl code. I only need the EXE file made to work on Windows, I don't care which OS or Perl makes it.

• pp and PAR::Packer cannot be installed on Strawberry Perl 5.18.2. It just doesn't work. I tried with cpanm, cpan, and ppm. It fails on all accounts.
• The default Par::Packer from cpan that is gotten is 1.27, though the most recent version on CPAN says, as of yesterday, 1.28. I don't know why.
• pp doesn't seem to install with most versions of Strawberry perl. PP has been broken for years with SP.
• ActiveState perl has a lot of older modules, and some handy modules just aren't in their repo. So I can't use ActiveState.
• Perl2exe doesn't work with any version of Strawberry perl. I already contacted their tech support.
• I don't need to hide code, I just need to make an EXE file for a DOS box so people don't have to install perl, and can use my program.
• Modules I need: Text::MultiMarkdown and Auto::Config, Date::Simple. Text::Wrap is optional.
• I'm looking into CitrusPerl and Cava for Windows but I don't know how to find modules Citrus Perl has. ActiveState and Strawberry Perl both seem to have their own repos, so I assume Citrus also does. EDIT: Cava only works with perl 5.14 and some earlier versions. Has anyone tested Cava with Strawberry perl 5.14? How about SP 5.18.2?

So what are my options? Can I make a windows CLI exe file on Ubuntu perl?

Thank you so much, you all are very helpful. Happy holidays!