Hmm .. I'm currently on Win98 and have ActiveState installed and running fine. However, except for a few Rebuild This Web Site scripts, I run everything from the command line (actually, a 4DOS prompt, but a regular command line would work fine too).

Open up a command line session and type path and see what you get. I get

PATH=C:\PERL\BIN;C:\WINDOWS;C:\WINDOWS\COMMAND;C:\4DOS402;C:\PROGRAM F
+ILES\MTS
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from my 4DOS session (and I get the same thing in my MD-DOS prompt -- I just checked). What do you get? (Hint: You should have C:\PERL\BIN somewhere in the path -- if not, that's the problem you should be solving.)

With \PERL\BIN in your path you should be able to run your scripts from a command line. In fact, you should be able to run perl -v to find out your version level of Perl. (I get 5.6.0, build 616 from ActiveState, so I guess I'm up to date.)

When I do run scripts from my desktop I enclose them in a BAT file that contains one line:

c:\perl\bin\perl -w txtproc.pl
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I include the path so I don't have to worry about how the PATH is set. It's not the coolest solution -- running the Perl script would be cooler -- I probably ran into the same problem that you did and decided (after five minutes of fiddling) to work around it instead of solving the problem. TMTOWTDI.

--t. alex

"Excellent. Release the hounds." -- Monty Burns.