I do most of my work on Win32 systems, so I know all too well about kludgy systems that lack c-compilers. The situation sucks badly. That's why I said, "if you can get it installed."

IIRC, ActiveState has a Solaris version of ActivePerl. Perhaps you could use that as a way to get a modern perl with binary module availability. You may even want to consider using Perlapp to make app bundles on another system.

For that matter, can you build your code on another solaris box and use PAR::Packager to make an executable bundle? If you have another suitable system, this approach seems rather appealing.

Sadly, I know of no deep pack/unpack magic to help you.

thanks but i said i don't want mess with perl on that box. that's a production system (call center reporting, actually) with high enough load and there may be some other perl scripts there that i'm not aware of. so i fear installing a newer perl is not an option or at least it's not effective. an extra kilobyte of the script code isn't worth several megabytes of newer perl distribution installed besides older one. :)