G'day steve.stone4,

Welcome to the Monastery.

Modifying the system Perl on Mac OS X is generally not a good idea. In fact, unless you have a specific reason for doing this, it's likely to be a bad idea. I started using Mac OS X last year, and received some very sage advice when I asked "Are there any major Perl issues with Mac OS X Lion?" - not modifying system Perl was a common theme.

Of the various Perl options discussed, I didn't try ActiveState and preferred Perlbrew over MacPorts. Beyond that, I pretty much followed the advice on Developer Tools, Xcode, etc. as given.

There's been a few discussions recently regarding Mac OS X and Perlbrew, so searching on those strings may prove fruitful.