Newbie: Perl 5.8.0 not working in Red Hat 8.0

[Bryan Hilterbrand]

I installed Red Hat 8.0 on an old system that I had laying around, and the
Red Hat installer put Perl 5.8.0 on my system. Whenever I try to run Perl,
it fails. For example:

[root@teeny root]# perl -V
Perl v5.6.0 required--this is only v5.8.0, stopped at
/usr/lib/perl5/5.8.0/Exporter.pm line 3.
Compilation failed in require at
/usr/lib/perl5/5.8.0/i386-linux-thread-multi/Config.pm line 2.
BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at
/usr/lib/perl5/5.8.0/i386-linux-thread-multi/Config.pm line 2.
Compilation failed in require.
BEGIN failed--compilation aborted.

[root@moose root]# perl -v
This is perl, v5.8.0 built for i386-linux-thread-multi
[...]

[root@moose root]# which perl
/usr/bin/perl


I searched all over trying to answer this one, but I couldn't find any
solutions for this particular problem.

Random details that probably don't matter: 300MHz AMD K6-2 with 64MB memory
and a 2GB hard drive. Red Hat Linux release 8.0 (Psyche).

Thank you for any help!
Bryan

[Dan Wilga]

In article <bkfoo2$kn4$1@terabinaries.xmission.com>,
"Bryan Hilterbrand" <no.bryanah.trash.email@bullwinkle.net> wrote:

> I installed Red Hat 8.0 on an old system that I had laying around, and the
> Red Hat installer put Perl 5.8.0 on my system. Whenever I try to run Perl,
> it fails. For example:
>
> [root@teeny root]# perl -V
> Perl v5.6.0 required--this is only v5.8.0, stopped at
> /usr/lib/perl5/5.8.0/Exporter.pm line 3.
> Compilation failed in require at
> /usr/lib/perl5/5.8.0/i386-linux-thread-multi/Config.pm line 2.
> BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at
> /usr/lib/perl5/5.8.0/i386-linux-thread-multi/Config.pm line 2.
> Compilation failed in require.
> BEGIN failed--compilation aborted.

This looks like the perl binary is probably 5.6.0, whereas it's looking
in a directory which contains 5.8.0 modules.

I suggest you check your PATH environment variable (`whereis perl`) to
see if there are multiple copies of the binary lurking on your machine.

It would also be a good idea to download the Perl source and re-compile
it from scratch. I, and others, have had lots of problems with RedHat's
stock RPMs of Perl.

--
Dan Wilga [email]dwilga-MUNGE@mtholyoke.edu[/email]
** Remove the -MUNGE in my address to reply **

[Bryan Hilterbrand]

"Dan Wilga" <dwilga-MUNGE@mtholyoke.edu> wrote in message
news:dwilga-MUNGE-C0271E.17213919092003@nap.mtholyoke.edu...

>
> This looks like the perl binary is probably 5.6.0, whereas it's looking
> in a directory which contains 5.8.0 modules.
>
> I suggest you check your PATH environment variable (`whereis perl`) to
> see if there are multiple copies of the binary lurking on your machine.
>
> It would also be a good idea to download the Perl source and re-compile
> it from scratch. I, and others, have had lots of problems with RedHat's
> stock RPMs of Perl.

Thanks for the info, Dan!

I did the "whereis perl", and it just returned:

[root@moose root]# whereis perl
perl: /usr/bin/perl /usr/share/man/man1/perl.1.gz

So it looks like the installation is messed up. If I build it myself, which
RPMs should I remove? There is a bunch of them:

[root@moose root]# rpm -qa | grep perl
perl-Parse-Yapp-1.05-26
perl-libxml-perl-0.07-25
perl-XML-Grove-0.46alpha-21
perl-5.8.0-55
perl-DateManip-5.40-27
perl-HTML-Parser-3.26-14
perl-URI-1.21-3
perl-XML-Parser-2.31-12
perl-XML-Dumper-0.4-22
perl-libxml-enno-1.02-25
perl-XML-Twig-3.05-3
mod_perl-1.99_05-3
perl-Filter-1.28-9
perl-CPAN-1.61-55
perl-HTML-Tagset-3.03-25
perl-libwww-perl-5.65-2
perl-XML-Encoding-1.01-20

Should I just remove perl-5.8.0-55 and compile/install stable.tar.gz that I
downloaded from cpan.org? Or should I remove them all, and then find all
the Perl libraries and install them?

Bryan