The Perl5 installation I have here, complete with modules, is 20MB. A more heavily loaded version I also use is 26MB. How can anyone claim in the age of 160GB hard drives that this is somehow too large?

Grr. (This is one of my pet peeves.)

Many people run free Unixlikes on old hardware, as low volume mail or web servers, firewalls, and so on. On a 200MB hard drive, 20MB is too large, especially when /var/log fills rapidly (as it does on firewalls or net servers). Not everyone runs, or can afford, an even remotely new machine.

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:wq