Ok, getting back to you, ikegami, wrt to where you said:

I haven't played much with sudo and how it affects the environment, but it seems possible that PERL5LIB isn't inherited or set in the child.

I've just run a couple commands in the shell to check this. Recollecting that bash sources /etc/profile for a login shell, we become root using the flag that tells bash it is a login shell, and check its environment:

somian@antique-acer:~/repos$ sudo bash -login -i
root@antique-acer:/home/somian/repos# env | grep ^PERL
PERL5LIB=/usr/share/perl5
[download]

Now we do that same but leave out the -login flag, and PERL5LIB vanishes:

somian@antique-acer:~/repos$ sudo bash -i
root@antique-acer:/home/somian/repos# env | grep ^PERL
root@antique-acer:/home/somian/repos#
[download]

The apparent conclusion is that $PERL5LIB is not inherited when running as root, and furthermore won't be set when bash's root child process starts if one's setup is such that we set it in /etc/profile (which seems to me to be the "right" place for it).

As I wrote before: "I was running as root because I wanted to store my pinto stacks under /usr/local/lib/pinto." Just not one of my brighter ideas, and I put it down to not having enough *nix knowledge. Now I am setting up repositories under my home dir and things are working as they should.

Mar 19, 2025 at 02:42 UTC