Could you show the output of perl -V? Every Perl installation has multiple @INC paths where Perl will look for modules, so it's possible you've currently got just one copy of Perl on your system. I'm guessing you already had the DBD::Oracle module installed, and then installed another version manually, which went into /usr/local/lib. But that's just a guess so whether or not it's safe to delete files from that path without breaking anything else is hard to say and depends very much on the details of your system!

In general, having multiple Perl installations is not a problem as long as you use the correct perl binary. Each installation will (and should!) have its own set of @INC paths. While I understand the desire to keep the system "clean" of unneeded software, consider that there may be a good reason for the files to be where they are. In particular, messing with the system Perl is generally not recommended. Some even go so far as to advise to not install CPAN modules into the system Perl, and instead use only the system's package manager (apt or yum or whatever) to install the precompiled modules into the system Perl.

Instead, you could build your own Perl, independent of the system Perl, into which you can install modules from CPAN etc. Since such Perl installations are usually contained below a single directory, they are also easy to delete and re-install if problems arise. See perlbrew for an easy way to build your own Perl, but even compiling from source is pretty easy too. Using Configure's prefix option you could install a copy of Perl in, for example, /opt/.

In reply to Re: Recovery of a "multi-perl" installation by Anonymous Monk
in thread Recovery of a "multi-perl" installation by haricot-48

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