my $version = $];
[download]

Update: Ooh... I should have read your post more closely :) After quite a bit of searching, the only solution I could find was the backticks (though this doesn't mean a solution is not available.)

perl -e "($version) = (`perl -v` =~ /build (\d+)/);print $version"
[download]

Cheers,
Ovid

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