Thank you davidrw. I failed to find that in my searches -- probably because of my use of "standalone" instead of "portable", and "key" instead of "thumbdrive"!

Thanks to everyone for their comments. A few days ago I wasn't aware of a single portable version of Perl and now I have more options than I know what to do with!

The immediate problem I had was solved with TinyPerl as I needed to do some simple pinging and executable launching. That was very messy in Windows batch script and nice and simple in Perl.

Next I need to figure out which of these variants will get pride of place on the USB key. Given that I have plenty of free space I wonder if I could fit all of them on there... :)

Has someone done the work already

Sort of. To create Vanilla/Strawberry Perl, I use Perl::Dist::Strawberry, which uses Perl::Dist::Builder. The latter badly needs a re-write -- which is high on my list of "to-do" as soon as I have time. However, in the meantime, it may work for you, like this:

1. Install some sort of Perl on your Win32 machine. (ActiveState or Strawberry, most likely.)

2. Download and install Perl::Dist::Strawberry (and dependencies). Right now, that's an annoying process of CPAN install to get dependencies and then download the tarball again separately into a working directory. Change into that directory.

3. Edit strawberry.yml and change the image_dir parameter to the drive/path of your desired USB key perl. E.g.

   image_dir: e:\thumb-perl
   [download]

   Note -- you may want to force your USB key to a high drive letter and always use that. Until we have "relocatable perl" (hopefully the next release), the hard-coded directories during compilation are used for @INC. That means that compiling to e:\thumb-perl and then mounting the key somewhere else as g:\thumb-perl probably won't work.

4. Set your environment variables to take defaults and skip some testing:

   > set PERL_MM_USE_DEFAULT=1
   > set AUTOMATED_TESTING=1
   [download]

5. Run "perl bin\build_all.pl"

6. Wait for all the various Strawberry Perl binaries and Perl sources to download, install, compile, etc.

No guaranteees that will work -- each Strawberry Perl build still has an element of hope/prayer to it. But I wish you luck.

if you always want to have the same path, you could also use subst (CMD command).For example:

subst <usbdriveletter>:\myportablesoftware v:
[download]

like that you could "remount" a directory as an drive letter. If you pick a higher drive letter it's likely that it never will be taken. If you configure your software for v: it will always work, you'll only have to call subst with a correct directory before trying to execute the scripts.

Never without (win32) perl might also be of interest.

HTH,

On URL: http://www.mhuffman.com/resource/index.html Check "Minimal Perl" Win32 binary (560 Kb) Installed: ~1 Mb I copied perl and Dll in a directory and it works ... may be that is what you are looking for !!