One of the updates to Perl changed a default. Perl used to default to searching the current directory for modules, but no longer does so. If you are getting errors suggesting modules are missing, you might try adding use lib '.'; to the code that has the problem. But you will get better answers if you show that code and the errors, and may find it yourself if you try to prepare a SSCCE (http://sscce.org).

Regards,

John Davies

No, don't do that. "." is not the script's directory. You want

use FindBin qw( $RealBin );
use lib $RealBin;
[download]

Thanks. I'll put that in my toolkit for next time.

Regards,

John Davies

This exact situation happened to me back before I knew how to segregate my own libraries properly from the system Perl. Broke a bunch of websites and took me a week to sort out because I barely knew what I was doing and I had to reinstall hundreds of modules I hadn’t bothered to track.

This is potentially the kind of thing you could fix easily with a little good advice from the monks. I posit, however, that it is probably something that is extremely difficult to do with what amounts to a game of charades/Pictionary with you relaying partial information you don’t understand or know how to find to those trying to guess what it means or what you could try next. So, I would say, it might be best to post it as a job on https://jobs.perl.org/ and screen candidates carefully before giving anyone permission/credentials to your site. This is probably a short/easy job for a good Perl hacker.

1) install perl in $home 2) scandeps to find deps and cpanm to install them 3) adjust shebangs

Why are you telling a hacker who learned to solve these issues 15 years ago instead of suggesting it to the OP who wouldn’t understand or be able to do any of that? I guess I answered it for you. :P

Other good advice aside, you might contact said provider and ask if they were conscientious enough to keep a copy of the prior version of perl available. If so they may also have instructions on how to diddle your environment to pick that up and get you back running while you transition things to the newer version.

G'day sheenzt,

Welcome to the Monastery.

As already stated by others, you'll need to tell us the previous and new versions of Perl; and, at the very least, we'll need to see some of these errors to have some hope of helping you with this.

"I do not know Perl but would like to know if there are any resources I can get some information on how to update the script on my side to make it compatible with the updated version of Perl."

That sounds like you're thinking of doing the updates yourself. Have a read of perlintro: that will give you some basic understanding of the code you're dealing with; in addition, that page is peppered with links to more information about each topic (follow those as required). I'd recommend bookmarking the online Perl Documentation. And, of course, you can ask questions here: we're more than happy to help you learn.

One place to start fixing your errors would be to look in "Perl Diagnostic Messages". This will tell you about the problem; in many cases, a fix is suggested or a link is provided for more information. The entries in there are generic and use formats to replace certain elements of the message; for instance, "Can't use an undefined value as %s reference". Your error may have the "%s" replaced with something like "an ARRAY" or "a HASH". Don't search for your entire message as it won't be found; look for some part of it (in this example, there's only one match for "Can't use an undefined value").

When incompatible changes are introduced, they are noted in the deltas (release notes). Links to these are listed in the Miscellaneous section of the online documentation. You generally only need to look at those for versions like "5.NN.0"; the link will have a name like "perl5NN0delta". Versions with a final number other than "0" generally contains minor fixes and updates with no incompatible changes; one notable exception is 5.10.1 which has incompatibilities with 5.10.0. You'll generally find information about how to handle the changes in these documents. As an example, the change indicated by davies is documented in "perl5260delta: Removal of the current directory ("." ) from @INC" with substantial information on how to deal with it.

Another reason for your errors could be experimental features that were available in the previous Perl version that you were using but have since been removed. The perlexperiment page has information regarding the Perl versions when these features were introduced, deprecated and removed.

So, that's a number of resources that you may find useful. As stated at the outset, you'll need to provide us with more information to get concrete help on specific problems.

Instead of relying on the system Perl, you can always install your own (e.g. using perlbrew) to avoid having to face this again.