in reply to Re: @INC site/lib problem on Windows 7 and XP (ActiveState Perl)
in thread @INC site/lib problem on Windows 7 and XP (ActiveState Perl)

Thanks for the tip on the save/restore profile! I was under the impression that profiles only worked if you had a professional license or something from ActiveState.

Regarding my original problem..

On all machines, I downloaded the MSI installer and ran it to completion, using defaults for everything except the path. I set the path to <drive-letter>:/activestate/perl/5.10/ (where the only difference between machines is which drive I installed it on; C: on one computer, D: on the other.) Likewise, I used the PPM GUI on each to install the hardlink package (eventually, I have about 250 packages I want installed, but I wanted to install the base AS Perl and one package to test that everything was working before going full steam ahead.)

I do remember many lifetimes ago when I installed the ancient AS Perl 5.6, I had a similar problem on another machine (Originally Win2K but later upgraded to XP--do not remember if I installed AS Perl 5.6 before or after the upgrade), but was able to fix it by modifying some file in the lib/ tree to modify the @INC var (it was some config file which I cannot seem to locate a similar file in 5.10.) If I can do something similar again, that would work fine for my needs. But I do not know where 5.10 stores it's config info as I cannot seem to find it.

I've also worked around it for the time being by having all my scripts call C:/sys/bin/set-perl-env.bat (as all my machines have a C:/sys/bin folder for storing commonly used binaries and scripts) which sets up the Perl environment for the current machine before calling Perl.

(Although I am still curious to understand why I am having this issue!)

TIA

  • Comment on Re^2: @INC site/lib problem on Windows 7 and XP (ActiveState Perl)

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Re^3: @INC site/lib problem on Windows 7 and XP (ActiveState Perl)
by Anonymous Monk on Jan 30, 2011 at 17:04 UTC
    Correction, I forgot I also used the PPM GUI to install a second package, Win32::Symlink, but have been only using the Win32::Hardlink package as my testing rat..
[reply]
      I set the path to <drive-letter>:/activestate/perl/5.10/
      I suspect something went wrong in this GUI over-ride of the path. Active State "likes" to install into C:\Perl. I have seen this install into other directories. Use the GUI to navigate to the installation directory. I would create this non-standard c:|d:\activestate\perl\5.10 directory prior to running the install.

      Sorry that I cannot help further. It is possible to install Active State into a non-standard directory and I've seen it done. Maybe there is something a bit strange about Win7?? I think that is highly likely.

[reply]
        Storing default win32 ActivePerl perl in a directory called 5.10 will break @INC, see How is the default @INC constructed? 
        $ perl\bin\perl.exe -le "print for @INC"
C:/tmp/ActivePerl-5.10.1.1006-MSWin32-x86-291086/ActivePerl-5.10.1.100
+6-MSWin32-x86-291086/perl/site/lib
C:/tmp/ActivePerl-5.10.1.1006-MSWin32-x86-291086/ActivePerl-5.10.1.100
+6-MSWin32-x86-291086/perl/lib
.

$ rename perl 5.10

$ 5.10\bin\perl.exe -le "print for @INC"
C:/tmp/ActivePerl-5.10.1.1006-MSWin32-x86-291086/ActivePerl-5.10.1.100
+6-MSWin32-x86-291086/5.10/lib
.

        [download]
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Re^3: @INC site/lib problem on Windows 7 and XP (ActiveState Perl)
by Anonymous Monk on Feb 16, 2011 at 17:13 UTC
    There is a bug in core Perl on Windows that doesn't set up @INC correctly if Perl is installed into a directory that starts with the letter '5'. Your problem should go away if you install into C:/activestate/perl/v5.10 instead.

    This bug is at least 10 years old and somewhat related to finding additional site_lib directories when you are using the versioned directory layout scheme where multiple Perl versions share site_lib directories.

[reply]
[d/l]
      There is a bug in core Perl on Windows that doesn't set up @INC correctly if Perl is installed into a directory that starts with the letter '5'.

      Is this documented somewhere? (It could explain some problems I've had in the past>)

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