Does that mean have another perl folder containing complete perl installation? If that's true, not sure if I can just download Perl 5.8...

Essentially, yes, the complete Perl installation (binary, modules, etc.) can be put under a specific directory (plus subdirectories, of course).

Note however, that if you download a prebuilt Perl distribution, there will be some installation path hardcoded in the binary, which means you can't arbitrarily move around the installation — for example, if the original hardcoded path is /opt/perl, you can't simply put it into /usr/local/perl/5.8.8 or similar. The reason for this is that perl needs to find its associated Config.pm, which then contains all the other settings, like where to look for the modules that belong to that version, etc.  (This applies to unix-ish systems only, on Windows this is a non-issue.)

For this reason, you might want to build your own perl from source, so that you can specify the installation path yourself at build time...

That said, there is a new feature "relocatable @INC" (i.e. Configure option -Duserelocatableinc, introduced with 5.10), which effectively allows modules to be found relative to where the perl binary is installed — IOW, the installation can now be moved around freely.  If you're lucky, you might find a prebuilt perl v5.10 that's been configured with this option.

In reply to Re^5: Issue in migration of Perl code from 5.6.1 to 5.8.6 (relocatable @INC) by almut
in thread Issue in migration of Perl code from 5.6.1 to 5.8.6 by ja3

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