As Roger said, I still can't say I understand the problem. If you are compiling with something like PAR to generate a stand alone executable, then you won't need Perl at all. Perhaps your perl script is doing something like exec'ing Perl within itself? Perhaps that could be removed?

This may not be related to your question, but in systems where you don't know where perl is installed, you can usually get away with using the following as the shebang:

#!perl
[download]

This will execute whatever perl is in your path. If you need to see if Perl exists or not, Roger made a good point...write a shell script to do it. /bin/sh is always going to be there on Unix-ish platforms.

Ok well I wrote a programming environment (glorified text editor) for perl in perl. Now I am going to compile the editor but in the script I have a "check syntax" and "run script" function which as I am sure you can guess call the perl interpretor.

Instead of just erroring when this function is called and the interpretor is not on their system I would like to be able to make sure they have a perl interpretor installed and prompt them to install it if not.

Or maybe even not have these 2 buttons show up at all if perl is not installed on the system

I know it sounded a little confusing, does it make since now?

Oh and I am compiling it with the free version of perl2exe but was wondering if there was a better free one out there that does not have trial version limitations. I have tried perlcc, B::CC and I think one other and they all error. perl2exe is the only one that compiles successfully.