I use Cygwin and ActivePerl on the machine at work. I have used it on NT4 before upgrading to Win2K. For the most part, everything work as long as you are not trying do a lot of cygwin shell to perl script integration. Then it starts to break, mostly because activeperl does not understand the "unix"ied path that cygwin passes it. I wish cygwin would handle the windows paths the way MKS utilities used to. There is a utility call cygpath that can convert a given file path between cygwin and windows, however it does not solve all cases in my experience. There is a version of perl that ships with cygwin but it has some serious limitations. I had issues running perl scripts out of the cygwin environment. Some of the CPAN modules would not compile under cygwin.

As far as using ActiveState goes its not bad. They seem to have a lot of the common modules in their PPM format. If you have visual studio on you machine you can even install the CPAN module and get stuff directly out of cpan. Note that just having nmake might not be enough because some of the modules have a corresponding C/C++ code that needs to be compiled. All this being said, it still is not as easy as installing and using perl on a unix or linux box :) As far as ppt goes, I would pick cygwin if only for being able to run a bash shell and having almost the same environment on windoze and my linux box.

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<cite>Just a tongue-tied, twisted, earth-bound misfit. -- Pink Floyd</cite>