There are several ways to handle the version depending on what you want to do with it. I like to break it up into its components like so:

my ($major, $minor, $patch) = unpack 'CCC', $^V;
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If you just want to print it, have a look at the docs for sprintf() and printf(). They support things like:

my $version_string = sprintf "%vd", $^V;
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If you want to compare it you can do so directly using Perl's new "vector of ordinal" type strings:

warn "Unsupported version\n" unless $^V ge v5.6.0;
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-sauoq
"My two cents aren't worth a dime.";