Panix Help System: Using Perl at Panix

Using Perl at Panix

Panix has been around a long time, and a lot of our customers depend on scripts written for them by others in earlier versions of Perl. In order to avoid breaking those scripts and still allowing customers ready access to newer versions of Perl, we've made it possible for customers to select their default version of perl.

For instance, if you want to use perl-5.24.3 you can either:

• Set the environment variable PERL to the pathname to use:: sh based shells:; export PERL=/usr/local/bin/perl-5-24.3; csh based shells:; setenv PERL /usr/local/bin/perl-5.24.3
or
•Create a symbolic link in your home directory: ln -s /usr/local/bin/perl-5.24.3 ~/.defaultperl
If both are set, the environment variable takes precedence.

Due to the fact that perl teeny version updates can happen quickly due to security concerns, for the newer perls (5.14.x on), we have added slightly less specific symlinks to make such updates less confusing. For instance, perl-5.24 will always point to the latest version of the perl-5.24 series. These links can also be used as specified above.

See also Using perl/CGI on the web servers