Note that doing a Super Search for articles that mention LD_LIBRARY_PATH might have gotten you enough information to get past this problem. I didn't find the answer neatly wrapped up (but I only looked at a couple of the hits), though, so here is one...

You likely can't set LD_LIBRARY_PATH from within the running process no matter how early you do it as the linker/loader has already started loading the process and has cached the value of LD_LIBRARY_PATH. Previously I've work around this by execing the perl executable so that it must reload and will see the new LD_LIBRARY_PATH that I have set. On some operating systems, even that isn't enough as the linker/loader notices that we are execing the same executable and doesn't bother to reinitialize. For such cases, you have to exec a different executable and ask it to exec perl for you.

Something close to the following should work:

BEGIN {
    my $need= '/usr/local/sybase/lib';
    my $ld= $ENV{LD_LIBRARY_PATH};
    if(  ! $ld  ) {
        $ENV{LD_LIBRARY_PATH}= $need;
    } elsif(  $ld !~ m#(^|:)\Q$need\E(:|$)#  ) {
        $ENV{LD_LIBRARY_PATH} .= ':' . $need;
    } else {
        $need= "";
    }
    if(  $need  ) {
        exec 'env', $^X, $0, @ARGV;
    }
}
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