G'day Rob,

++ Many thanks. That's pretty much exactly what I was looking for. I followed your instructions and everything worked perfectly.

When I came back to write this, I saw your update. Actually, in my case, removing the 5_030_000 was necessary; although, a simple s/30_000/26_003/ on three lines was all that was required. I also removed the ActivePerl entries from the path. The reason is that if something is not found under 5.26, I want to know about it; instead of a something that I'd previously installed under 5.30 (or 5.16) being silently used — I'm not sure how likely that might be, but now I can be certain it won't happen. I've documented all paths and the changes I've made — probably less than a minute's work to swap to a different version.

So now my PATH looks like this (split up, and a chuck removed from the middle, for ease of viewing):

C:\Users\ken\tmp>echo %PATH%
C:\Users\ken\local\opt\strawberry_perl\5_026_003\install\perl\site\bin
+;
C:\Users\ken\local\opt\strawberry_perl\5_026_003\install\perl\bin;
C:\Users\ken\local\opt\strawberry_perl\5_026_003\install\c\bin;
...;
C:\Users\ken\local\bin
[download]

I get the added benefit of only having to start cmd.exe:

C:\Users\ken\tmp>perl -v

This is perl 5, version 26, subversion 3 (v5.26.3) built for MSWin32-x
+64-multi-thread
...

C:\Users\ken\tmp>perl -E "say for @INC"
C:/Users/ken/local/opt/strawberry_perl/5_026_003/install/perl/site/lib
C:/Users/ken/local/opt/strawberry_perl/5_026_003/install/perl/vendor/l
+ib
C:/Users/ken/local/opt/strawberry_perl/5_026_003/install/perl/lib
[download]

This is probably not ideal if you want to quickly swap between versions; however, for my current ($work) needs, it's spot on. Thanks again.

Everything that you've mentioned is the reason behind berrybrew. It does all of that path documenting and management itself. It provides you the ability to switch between versions with a single command (or in newer versions, with a couple of clicks of the mouse as well).