I can think of at least three variants:

my $module = $^O =~ /MSWin32/ ? "Win32::Foo" : "Unix::Bar";
# /win/ will make Darwin (OSX) users unhappy :-)

eval "use $module"
  or die "$module didn't return a true value";
die $@ if $@;

[download]
or the manual way of doing what use does: 
BEGIN{
  if ($^O =~ /MSWin32/) {
    require Win32::Foo;
    Win32::Foo->import();
  } else {
    require Unix::Bar;
    Unix::Bar->import();
  };
};

[download]

Or, if you are not afraid to use modules conceived by Michael Schwern, and you do load modules from several places, like in a plugin setting:

use UNIVERSAL::require;
my $module = $^O =~ /MSWin32/ ? "Win32::Foo" : "Unix::Bar";

$module->require;
$module->import(1,2,3);

[download]

There also is the way of completely emulating what use does:

BEGIN {
  my $module = $^O =~ /MSWin32/ ? "Win32::Foo" : "Unix::Bar";

  my $file = $module . ".pm";
  $file =~ s!::!/!g;

  require $file
    or die "$file didn't return a true value";

  $module->import();
};

[download]

So many options - the most sane ones are upper in this post though.

Update: Added the fully-manual way of use emulation

In reply to Re: how to use different packages depending on host OS? by Corion
in thread how to use different packages depending on host OS? by smullis

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