Recently I suggested using miniperl instead of the regular perl in a tight environment. Then I decided I'd better check exactly how much better this perl was in terms of disk space, and how much worse it was in terms of functionality. I was surprised by the answer to my first question:

% ls -l miniperl perl
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root root 150137 May 26 15:43 miniperl
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root root  59507 May 26 15:43 perl
[download]

That is, the full-featured perl is smaller by almost 90k than something that was supposed to be a tighter version?

Of course, I said, miniperl's probably statically linked so the executable must be self-contained, but doesn't require libperl, right? Wrong, it turns out: ldd shows the two depend on the same libraries, so miniperl isn't so mini. What gives?

(All this is on Linux.)

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