You certainly seem unsure. Perhaps you can find out and enlighten us. I suppose you would say that setting $ENV{PATH} will affect everything that Perl does--where it finds its modules, where it runs its "system" command as well, etc. I'm not sure how gullible I am assumed to be to think Perl is so unstable as this would obviously make it. But it does appear that some rather odd things with Perl erasing the $ENV{PATH} crept in post version 5.26. As I said earlier, I've been fortunate (until now) to be on older versions previous to this.