The mod_perl from the ports collection will almost certainly require that a registered package of perl 5.8.x from the posts collection is also installed - if you have instaled the perl 5.8.0 by hand then it probably won't work. Either install the apache/mod_perl by hand or install the perl 5.8.x from the ports collection.

/J\

Thank you for the replies
perl -v from the command line without a path gets the results from original post:
perl v5.8.0 built for i386-freebsd
the OS did come with perl v5.6.x
I upgraded perl from the ports collection quite some time ago
I think my next step will be downloading and compiling mod_perl by hand

Thank you for the advice

Change PERL_VER in /etc/make.conf and try again ?

thank you!!
that sounds like the ticket!
will try and post back the results tonight

thanks again

b10m, editing the make.conf file fixed the problem
Thanks for the advice

Some more information on this (which was shown to you when you finished `make install` ;)

Installation of Perl distribution is finished.  Please note, that since
Perl is also in the base system, this distribution will not be used by
default.

If you want this version of Perl to be used by default, please type

  use.perl port

Assuming that use.perl script (which was installed with the rest of the
Perl distribution) can be found in your PATH (you might have to type
`rehash' first, depending upon a shell you use), this action will
replace /usr/bin/perl and /usr/bin/suidperl with symbolic links to the
versions of these binaries in the Perl distribution.  This action will
also put some variables into your /etc/make.conf file, so that newly
installed ports (not packages!) will use new version of perl, and the
system upgrades from the source will not overwrite the changes made.

At any time you can also type

  use.perl system

if you wish to revert back to the system version of perl.

--
b10m

All code is usually tested, but rarely trusted.