in reply to Re^4: Issue in migration of Perl code from 5.6.1 to 5.8.6
in thread Issue in migration of Perl code from 5.6.1 to 5.8.6

Does that mean have another perl folder containing complete perl installation? If that's true, not sure if I can just download Perl 5.8...

Essentially, yes, the complete Perl installation (binary, modules, etc.) can be put under a specific directory (plus subdirectories, of course).

Note however, that if you download a prebuilt Perl distribution, there will be some installation path hardcoded in the binary, which means you can't arbitrarily move around the installation — for example, if the original hardcoded path is /opt/perl, you can't simply put it into /usr/local/perl/5.8.8 or similar. The reason for this is that perl needs to find its associated Config.pm, which then contains all the other settings, like where to look for the modules that belong to that version, etc.  (This applies to unix-ish systems only, on Windows this is a non-issue.)

For this reason, you might want to build your own perl from source, so that you can specify the installation path yourself at build time...

That said, there is a new feature "relocatable @INC" (i.e. Configure option -Duserelocatableinc, introduced with 5.10), which effectively allows modules to be found relative to where the perl binary is installed — IOW, the installation can now be moved around freely.  If you're lucky, you might find a prebuilt perl v5.10 that's been configured with this option.

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Re^6: Issue in migration of Perl code from 5.6.1 to 5.8.6 (relocatable @INC)
by ja3 (Initiate) on Feb 10, 2009 at 17:04 UTC
    If I end up installing separate Perl, how can I run the code under this version in stead of stock perl? Thanks!
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      Just call the respective perl binary — either directly via its absolute path (typically in the shebang line of your script), or adjust your executable search path (PATH env var) such that the correct perl instance is found first (for when you type "perl somescript.pl" on the command line).

      If things are configured correctly (which is essentially what I was talking about in the last post), the perl binary should find the modules that belong to it — and preferably only those...  which is why it's usually not a good idea to globally set the environment variable PERL5LIB, if you have multiple perls installed (paths in PERL5LIB are being prepended to the configured/hardcoded module search paths in the binary and Config.pm, which could lead to modules being mixed up across different Perl installations).

      An easy way to check if things do work as desired is to simply invoke "perl -V" (capital V), or "/usr/local/perl/5.10/bin/perl -V" (or whatever you have installed) — which prints the perl version and all search paths being used (the latter near the end of the output).

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        Is there a way to know what modules will need to be installed to get the Perl code working? The Perl script that I am working with uses SOAP::Lite and HTTP::Cookies. When I do perl -MSOAP::Lite -le "print(SOAP::Lite-VERSION)" I get the version numbers for both the above modules. So I assume that they are installed fine. I also installed the LWP Bundle but it still throws the same error. fault_code -1 500 Usage: $h->push_header($field, $val) at /opt/perl5/lib/5.8.6/MatcherClient.pm line 347 Thanks
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        Hi, Thanks for your reply. I am now trying to setup my own perl and then try installing CPAN modules there. Since we already have perl 5.8.6 installed in a folder called "perl5", I made a copy of that in another folder called "perl5.8". Will this cause any issues? Also, when try to invoke CPAN, it starts initiazing the configuration file in "perl5" folder. How can I start it in teh 5.8 folder? Thanks
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