Upgrade Perl version on Solaris machine

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

Hi,

Can you please assist in upgrading perl from 5.8.x to 5.10?

Right now i am running the below verison on my Solaris SPARC machine.

Thanks in advance

2

My suggestion: Install perl 5.10 in a different location and use 5.10's binary for your perl programs. And in any case, DO NOT remove existing perl installation. Lot of unix packages rely heavily on the existing version of perl and to remove perl would mean damage to your unix installation. (I had to learn it the hard way).

Also, through the CPAN shell, you can use the upgrade command. Not sure how it works. I usually download the tarball and make it myself.

3

Thank you for your reply, But how can i point all the modules to use the latest binary?

4

Let's say you have installed perl 5.10 in /path/to/perl510 and the perl binary is /path/to/perl510/bin/perl

Your existing perl would be /usr/bin/perl right?

So you may mv /usr/bin/perl /usr/bin/perl58 and then ln -s /path/to/perl510/bin/perl /usr/bin/perl

That way you wouldn't have to edit any of your existing perl programs. And all your modules would point to the new perl binary.

1 Like
5

Thank you for the response.

I am trying to Install perl (5.10.1) on Solaris machine and issued the command (i.e)

Below is the output for configure

Please assist.

6

See if file(libgdbm.so.3) exists on your machine:

> find / -name "libgdbm.so.3" 2>/dev/null

Also, just curious, why not install latest stable version?

I recently downloaded(5.16.3, latest stable version is 5.18.0) and created a 'relocatable' perl installation on a "Solaris" box,
so after testing I got a SA that has access to 'root' to move the perl installation to "/opt/perl" and just create a link to
build this way the 'system' perl installations are not touched.

### Log of download and configure for perl(5.16.3) build for Solaris
cd /export/home/me/perl
> wget http://www.cpan.org/src/5.0/perl-5.16.3.tar.gz
Connecting to www.cpan.org|207.171.7.177|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 16930885 (16M) [application/octet-stream]
Saving to: `perl-5.16.3.tar.gz'

100%[======================================>] 16,930,885   520K/s   in 32s

-- perl-5.16.3.tar.gz' saved [16930885/16930885]

> gzip -dv perl-5.16.3.tar.gz
perl-5.16.3.tar.gz:       77.3% -- replaced with perl-5.16.3.tar

> tar -xf perl-5.16.3.tar
> cd perl-5.16.3
> sh Configure -des -Dcc=cc -Duse64bitall -Dusethreads -Dloclibpth="/opt/csw/lib/sparcv9" -Duserelocatableinc -Dprefix=/export/home/me/test/perl
7

Thank you for your reply. I dont understand

So after installing this we will have to create a symbolic link for the newly installed version in the new location?

---------- Post updated at 03:42 PM ---------- Previous update was at 03:39 PM ----------

Btw i can find the file (i.e)

---------- Post updated at 03:48 PM ---------- Previous update was at 03:42 PM ----------

Btw when used the command (i.e)

got the below output.

8

I have successfully installed Perl (5.10.1)and have a question in creating symbolic links

So what needs to be done for creating symbolic link to point perl to newer version (i.e) 5.10.1?

9

A little over kill but it's good info and you can get what you need from it:
Mulitple Perl Installations