`perl -we 'print $], $/;'` returns 5.008004. However this value does not imply v5.008004; rather v5.8.4 as explained in perlvar. Similarly, 5.006001 is not v5.006001 but rather v5.6.1.

UPDATE: Or if you'd rather use $^V:

print join '.', map { ord $_ } split(//, $^V);

An easier methd is

printf "%vd",$^V ;
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Manav

If you're trying to make sure a script only runs under a specific (or later) version, there is always:

use strict;
use warnings;
require 5.8.1;
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And if you don't want that to be fatal, you can do this:

use strict;
use warnings;
eval "require 5.8.1;";
if ( $@ ) {
    print "Nice try!\n$@";
} else {
    print "Thanks for not asking to run me under Perl 4.\n";
}
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$a=`perl -v` ##or `perl -V`
print $a
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print join '.', map { ord $_ } split(//, $^V);

And the result was 5.6.1, which of course is consistent with the 5.006001 returned by print "$]\n";

There's also use Config; print $Config{version}, "\n"; but I'd trust $] more.

If you really don't trust these, there are some features that can easily be tested with a few lines of code and are present in only from some versions: pack "U", pack "x!", pack "j", pack "x[L]", 3-arg open, stringstream open, \&Encode::is_utf, dump, [[::]] character classes, $^N, the EQ operator, open($fh, "+>", undef). However, some of these can cause surprising results if the perl you are using is compared with strange conffigure settings (like no perlio).