Like the AM mentioned above, pretend like the system perl doesn't even exist. Its really (and I mean really) easy to make your own perl. You can even make a bunch of them (different versions, whatever you want).

The easiest way is to use something like App::perlbrew. You'll install this module with the system CPAN, and then you can install and switch between perl versions with a couple simple commands.

If you want to manage the installs yourself so you see whats going on, to me in many ways its even easier than perlbrew:

$ wget http://www.cpan.org/src/5.0/perl-5.8.1.tar.gz
$ tar -zxf perl-5.8.1.tar.gz $ cd perl-5.8.1
$ sh Configure -de -Dprefix=/opt/perl-5.8.1
$ make
$ make install
$ export PATH="/opt/perl-5.8.1/bin:$PATH"
[download]

Now you have a throwaway perl in /opt/perl-5.8.1. Say you want to upgrade your modules but roll back if it doesn't work out. With this setup you can archive /opt/perl-5.8.1, do your module upgrades and test, and if it doesn't work out just delete /opt/perl-5.8.1 and extract the archive.

See my reply at Re: Windows type needs to set up Linux with Perl 5.8.1 to match PAUSE for more summary and Re: 2nd Perl installation on Mac OSX for complete details of how I manage perl installations if you're interested.