in reply to A mapping between perlvar and %Config ?

but I am not sure if $^X is identical to $Config{perlpath} or not.

Why not? perlvar has a couple of pages explaining what $^X means, the dangers of relying on $^X...

Config is the docs you want :) osname, perlpath

Basically, $^X is the name of the actual exe, wherever it lives, whatever it has been renamed to (notperl.exe)

except on VMS. perlvar warns about $^X not containing .exe suffix on VMS ... easier to document than fix VMS bugs I guess (weak sauce)

I use $^X all the time, I've never seen VMS :)

  • Comment on Re: A mapping between perlvar and %Config ? ( $^O $Config{osname} $^X $Config{perlpath} )

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Re^2: A mapping between perlvar and %Config ? ( $^O $Config{osname} $^X $Config{perlpath} )
by Laurent_R (Canon) on Aug 22, 2014 at 06:36 UTC
    I am using Perl on VMS quite regularly (perhaps an average 4 or 5 days per month. I would guess it has to do with the fact that you usually don't call exe files directly by their name on VMS, but almost always through a symbol (something similar to an environment variable) pointing to the exe file. Quite probably, $^X knows the symbol name, but not the exe file behind. I'll try to test this when I get to work.

    Update: Actually, I just tried, on our VMS platforms, with Perl version 5.8.6, $^X contains the full name, including physical path, exe extension and even the version number: 

    ROL>sh symbol perl
  PERL == "$PERL_ROOT:[000000]PERL.EXE"

ROL>sh logical PERL_ROOT
   "PERL_ROOT" = "$1$DGA3501:[SYS0.SYSCOMMON.PERL5_8_6.]" (LNM$JOB_834
+94F40)

ROL>perl  -e "print $^X, qq(\n)"
$1$dga3501:[sys0.syscommon.perl5_8_6.][000000]perl.exe;1

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      Ahh, fond memories. Actually miss that OS (15+20 years past). Lots of interesting features.

      --MidLifeXis

[reply]
        I must say that I think is is, or was, actually a quite good and robust system (although I prefer working on Unix).

        We have a huge monolithic customer management, phone provisionning, rating and billing, and accounting application running a cell phone client base of 35 million customers on 7 VMS clusters.

        However, HP has announced that it will discontinue suport within about 5 years, so we will probably port that application to Oracle and Linux. Migration from VMS will be a pretty large project.

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