in reply to Linking to the perl executable

The symlink is fine, a *nix standard way of doing that. That can also be used to provide a default perl (usually the latest) where all perls are installed with a version suffix to the same PREFIX: 

# ln -sf /usr/bin/perl-5.8.6 /usr/bin/perl
#

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Re^2: Linking to the perl executable
by doran (Deacon) on Mar 09, 2005 at 07:18 UTC
    Excellent. Thanks! I just wasn't sure if a symlink in /usr/bin to /usr/local/bin/perl was treated different than a hardlink. This is cool and makes it easy to ensure linking to the current version.
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      But please beware: many system utilities depend upon Perl; If your system comes with 5.005 installed, it usually resides in /usr/bin. Replacing /usr/bin/perl with another version (even when it resides in a different directory and you link to it) may break your system if not all system-installed modules are available of if system related programmes depend on bugs (or call them features) which are resolved in your Perl version.

      I advice you to test things thouroughly before applying this change to a production system

      Paul

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        Well, if system installed programs break if you replace /usr/bin/perl with a newer version, consider using an OS that gets it right. An OS that gets this right is Solaris. It also has important system utilies that use perl. However, the perl that comes with the system is installed somewhere (can't remember the exact location, and can't check now, but it's something like /usr/perl5/bin/perl), with /usr/bin/perl being a link to the real location. None of the system utilities use #!/usr/bin/perl, but instead, use the path #!/usr/bin/perl is pointing to. This leaves users the ability to replace /usr/bin/perl with another perl version, without having system utilies breaking.

        Now, if only more Linux distros would see the light.

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