I've been long looking for a (easy) way of maintaining several perl versions on the same box without having to modify any single old programs rely on the old perl.

This article Best Pratices for Keeping Your Perl Installation Sane describes the good ways to do it, but not how...

E.g. if I want to keep my old 5.8.8 and try 5.10 and my all old programs have the shebangs line sets to "/usr/bin/perl" - so if I install 5.10 in "/usr/local/perl/*" I presume it will also modify /usr/bin/perl into the new version?
If so, how to avoid it?

Also, what is the best way to quickly switch back and forth between those perl versions (inccluding the CPAN modules installed)? I might still need to code in 5.8.8 for the reason to sync with our production server, etc.

Any experiences?

---

---

Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!

Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.

Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.

Please read these before you post! —

• How do I compose an effective node title?
• How do I post a question effectively?
• Markup in the Monastery

Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:

a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr

You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)

	For:		Use:
	&		&
	<		&lt;
	>		&gt;
	[		&#91;
	]		&#93;

Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?

See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.