I'm running Perl v5.16.3 on Red Hat GNU/Linux 7.9.

OUCH! Perl 5.16 has been End-Of-Life without any security or stability updates for nearly a decade now. You REALLY need to upgrade to a newer Perl version.

Are you running the system Perl provided by Redhat? This is generally a bad idea for user provided scripts (e.g. anything that is NOT maintained by the Linux Distribution itself).

Most distributions also provide a number of packages to install extra Perl modules required by other packages from the distribution. If you mess with those (install stuff from CPAN, especially updated modules), you can easily break your operating system. This goes for pretty much all scripting languages, BTW, one of the reason NodeJS, Python, etc all use some variant of "install stuff into the users home directory".

From the error message i suspect that a mix-up between CPAN installed stuff and Redhat provided packages has indeed occured.

There are quite a few ways to use a user-provided perl installation. The easiest is probably Perlbrew. Personally, i'm a more oldschool hands-on guy that likes to finetune things, using the classic install instructions from https://www.cpan.org/src/ and a handful of complicated bash+perl scripts to finetune things on a per-project basis.

But as a start, i'd recommend using Perlbrew to install an up-to-date Perl 5.38 into your home directory and installing all the required modules ONLY from cpan. That way, we can be sure you have a reasonably clean installation and use that to help you trace any other problems that might occur.

With an ancient, unsupported Perl version that may or may have not been messed with by the Linux distributor and/or admins of the server, it's really hard to tell what the root cause of your problem is.

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In reply to Re: Meaning of XS object version by cavac
in thread Meaning of XS object version by regalbraith

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