Kevin,

You need to apply the 22 years worth of problem-solving skills that you've acquired to learning new things.

Your problem isn't "right out of the box" it's more like "wrong kind of box". You don't have a Windows based computer anymore. The paradigm has changed completely.

It is possible that you already have perl installed - it comes loaded on many versions of Solaris.

Try opening a shell window & typing:

perl -v

If you get any kind of response other than an error - it's already there.

If not, then you have to find out if you are also the System Administrator for your system as well as the user. If not, then you should ask the administrator to install it for you and to point you at some documentation to get you up to speed.

It doesn't seem right that someone should give you an entirely new platform that you're unprepared for and to make you the administrator also. It's a bit like dropping a fresh water fish in the ocean - nothing's going to work right and it's very dangerous.

- Gregor42

I have 22 years experience in IT

Are you talking about marketing, or management? ;)

and have recently been tasked with doing a lot of coding!

As opposed to... What would you normally be doing?

I am a serious DOS hacker so having to deal with Perl is a bit trivial for me

Not sure what you mean by "serious" and "trivial" there...

but I am having a serious problem right out of the box.

Well, maybe we shouldn't be surprised... Perl doesn't come in a box! If you're having trouble with something that comes out of a box, maybe you misread the label and got confused? Whatever you have that came out of that box, it's not Perl. (Or was it you that just came out of the box?)

But seriously folks, if you have a Sun workstation running Solaris, then you don't have to install Perl -- it's already there. If you've done some "DOS hacking" and worked with batch files, then you have a handle on the basics of the command line interface, which is the bread-and-butter of using any unix system like solaris. Some of the unix commands even have the same names as the DOS ones that do the same thing! (mkdir, cd)

But a lot of basic command things have different names ("ls" instead of "dir", "rm" instead of "del", "mv" instead of "ren", and so on) -- could be some tough going for you there, in which case you have my sympathy.

And then there's lots of really cool unix commands, things like "grep" and "cut" and "paste" and (shudder) "awk", that just don't exist at all in DOS (unless you installed some sort of "unix-tools-for-dos" package -- and that shouldn't come in a box either,* so if you try to get it out of a box, or if you're climbing out of a box to use it, it might not work for you).

Anyway, if you can find a command-line shell on your solaris machine (it should be showing something that ends with "$" or ">" as a command-line prompt), you can try this command:

which perl
[download]

Well, it's possible that instead of saying "/usr/bin/perl" or whatever, the "which perl" command might say "perl: command not found" or maybe even "no perl found in ..." -- this just means that there's nothing called "perl" in your current PATH (Aha! Another major thing that unix and DOS have in common... surely you know what PATH is for, having already hacked batch files and all.)

So if perl is not in your PATH, well, I could go on at length, but this all seems like a joke, and I've had my share of fun for one evening. Thanks, Kevin, good luck with your new tasks, and welcome to the Monastery!

(* footnote: Well, okay, I do remember something called the "MKS Toolkit" -- wow, that takes me back a couple decades -- which was the first "unix-for-dos" thing I ever heard of, and that did come in a box; this was before the Internet thing caught on, you see, when just about everything came in a box, or in padded or stiff envelopes, you know, with those 5-inch floppy disks, or the 3-inch ones that weren't really floppy at all... they didn't even have compact disks back then -- not for computers, at least. MKS appears to still be available, BTW, but I don't know if it still comes in a box... you might want to check it out, in case someone takes that solaris thing away and makes you go back to DOS.)

zcat latest.tar.gz | tar xf -
cd perl-*
./Configure
make
make test
make install
[download]

In the process, you will be asked a few question, but I guess you'll figure out. Come back to ask any time, preferably in the chatterbox.

_($_=" "x(1<<5)."?\n".q·/)Oo.  G°\        /
                              /\_¯/(q    /
----------------------------  \__(m.====·.(_("always off the crowd"))."·
");sub _{s./.($e="'Itrs `mnsgdq Gdbj O`qkdq")=~y/"-y/#-z/;$e.e && print}

Vanilla Solaris does not come with a compiler. The Software Companion CD/DVD does have gcc on it but that is not guarenteed to be installed and even if it is the PATH likely needs to be updated. For example:

export PATH="/usr/sfw/bin:/opt/sfw/bin/:$PATH"
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH="/usr/sfw/lib:/opt/sfw/lib/:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH"
[download]

I have 22 years experience in IT and have recently been tasked with doing a lot of coding!

I'm surprised (actually, stunned) that somebody with 22 years of IT experience has not dealt with multiple operating systems (I've dealt with VMS, DOS, VM, MVS/XA, NOS/VE, Windows in its various incarnations, Unix in about a half-dozen variants, and one or two others too obscure to remember). Solaris is a one of the Unix derivatives, so it won't have DOS, although somebody who wanted to could probable whip up a BAT file interpreter in a few hours (I'm not that somebody).

I suggest you get a book like Learning the Unix Operating System, Fifth Edition.

You might also take a review of the tutorial section we have here. It will make your experience here a great deal better if you read the section on "Understanding and using PerlMonks"