As its a sun box I don't think ldconfig is available though I could use crle to do the same thing you suggest.

Unfortunately I'm not in a position where I could could fiddle with the dynamic linker on this box. If I add '/local/src/local.perl/oracle/instantclient_10_2' to the default library path I'm running the risk of adversely affecting the horde of developers on the box.

I'd really like to figure out why setting the LD_LIBRARY_PATH in my script isn't working. I stuck a print statement in the code and LD_LIBRARY_PATH is defined during run time. I put it in a BEGIN block at the start of the script before doing a 'use DBI' so LD_LIBRARY_PATH should exist at the right time. But obviously its not....:'(