I finally decided to use Perlbrew for a new project I’m working on. Perlbrew makes it easy to manage multiple versions of perl on the same machine. I deployed a new instance with Debian 7. Debian 7 ships with perl 5.14.0. I wanted to use 5.18.0 (mostly to feel bad about using the smart match operator). Perlbrew makes it easy:
curl -L http://install.perlbrew.pl | bash
perlbrew install perl-5.18.0
perlbrew switch perl-5.18.0
That’s it:
perl -v
This is perl 5, version 18, subversion 0 (v5.18.0) built for x86_64-linux
Perlbrew twiddles $PATH to use the path it installed perl to (defaults to ~/perl5/perlbrew). You can install other versions besides each other and switch to whichever one is convenient. I’ll finally have something newer than 5.10.0 on my Mac.
Extra: One feature looks particularly useful for testing:
perlbrew exec myprogram.plThis command will run the specified script against all installed versions of perl. Why did I wait this long?