I'm well aware of the evils of LD_LIBRARY_PATH. But that was not my question, which was: why does Perl on Linux seem to require that LD_LIBRARY_PATH be defined before the script starts rather than being defined in a BEGIN block before DBD is loaded?

But are you aware the that is how LD_LIBRARY_PATH works for all programs? That its not a perl variable?

For every software Why? question, the answer is simple, because its written that way :)

The LD in LD_LIBRARY_PATH stands for one of the few/many "ld.so" , there is no PERL_ prefix

All docs I read about LD_LIBRARY_PATH mention its for testing/debugging...

If that answers the question, then great :)

P.S. If anyone can tell me how to do the equivalent of setting rpath in the .so files produced by AIX's xlc compiler, then I could go that route. But since I currently have to set LIBPATH for AIX (which I can set *inside* the script as opposed to prior to running the script like I have to do on Linux), then I'll stick to trying to set LD_LIBRARY_PATH on Linux.

aix? :) Internet says instead of -Wl,--rpath use LIBPATH= or -Wl,-blibpath