That was what I was doing when it all went wrong. Unfortunately I don't have the original distro as i gave it away to somone else, and anyway loads of people on scoop and #perl have told me that rh8 perl is "broken" ( for my purposes, setting up scoop) and it's better to get a fresh perl source and recompile it etc. Which strangely enough is what I am now compelled to do. So you can't help then?