I tried moving the

my $path

above the begin but it didn't work...

Interesting... that's exactly the kind of thing I was worried about.

I had tried:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

my $path;

BEGIN {
    $path = $0;
    $path =~ s{[^\/]+$}{libs/};
}
use lib $path;

use MyLib;
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With the module ./libs/MyLib.pm being

package MyLib;

printf "Module %s loaded.\n", __PACKAGE__;
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running the script prints

Module MyLib loaded.
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while commenting out the use lib $path gives the expected Can't locate MyLib.pm in @INC ...   IOW, it works for me.

$ perl -v | head -2

This is perl, v5.8.8 built for x86_64-linux-thread-multi
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