Your Perl version is the least of your problems. RH 7.2 was end of life'd around three years ago. Upgrade to a more recent OS and you'll more than likely get a more recent Perl to boot.

And as to your questions: Yes, but there's a newer version of CPAN.pm than ships with 5.8.8 I believe. And I personally tend to keep my own "application" version of Perl compiled separately from source independent of the OS' copy. That also ensures that updates to the OS are less likely to muck about with the "production" version of Perl.

In reply to Re: Upgrading Perl on Linux From 5.6.1 to 5.8.x by Fletch
in thread Upgrading Perl on Linux From 5.6.1 to 5.8.x by ali.muzaffar

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.