Hmm, this worked the first time, but fails the second time. That is, imagine the following situation (which roughly mirrors my own):

sub connect
{
   if (eval { require Net::LDAPS; } and ! $@)
   {
      $ldap = Net::LDAPS->new($_[0]);
   }
   else
   {
      $ldap = Net::LDAP->new($_[0]);
   }
   return $ldap;
}

sub auth
{
   $ldap = connect($_[2]);
   $ldap->bind($_[0],$_[1]) and return $ldap;
}

($dn,$pass,$host) = @ARGV;
auth($dn,$pass,$host) or die "auth failed\n";
$ldap = connect($host);
$ldap->bind($dn,password=>$pass)
...
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In my case, the auth and connect routines are both in a library which I use for a lot of different scripts, so I needed them to be generically useful; I can't always guarantee that the connect routine won't be run multiple times in the same script.

If I only run connect once, everything works fine, but if I run it twice, then the second time it doesn't record a failure, because Net::LDAPS has already failed to compile but is registered in %INC anyway.

Is there some kind of way to collect this information, or am I going to have to store a $::HAVESSL variable or something, which I hate?

And thanks for the quick response.