Installing ActivePerl for Linux

Prerequisites

Hardware: 250 MB hard disk space for typical install
Operating System: Linux distribution using glibc 2.15 or later (e.g. Ubuntu 12.04)
Online Help: Web browser
Check the LD_LIBRARY_PATH variable and unset any references to Perl & Lib if these are set

Installing ActivePerl on Linux

The installer allows installation as an unprivileged user into a user-specified path. GNU tar is required for extracting the files. See Known Issues in the ActivePerl Release Notes for details.

Warning: Do not use package managers to install ActivePerl as these use a different algorithm and will corrupt the tarball file.

Download the distribution to a temporary directory, extract the files, chdir to the ActivePerl directory and then run the script install.sh. The installation script will prompt you to accept the license agreement and to specify the target installation directory.

% tar zxf ActivePerl-<version>.tar.gz
% cd ActivePerl-5.24.3.2404/
% ./install.sh

If you share the system with other people, or if you do not have root access, it is recommended that you install ActivePerl in your own user directory. For example:

/home/<username>/ActivePerl-5.24

We suggest adding the following line to your shell configuration file (e.g. .profile, .bashrc, or .cshrc) file to auto-load this path whenever you open a new terminal window, log on, etc.:

PATH=$PATH:/home/<username>/bin

Also, we suggest that you create symbolic links to the binaries:

mkdir /home/<username>/bin
ln -s /home/<username>/ActivePerl-5.24/bin/perl /home/<username>/bin/perl
ln -s /home/<username>/ActivePerl-5.24/bin/ppm /home/<username>/bin/ppm

This will allow you to call ActivePerl with a command like:

perl -e 'print "Hello World!\n"'

Uninstalling ActivePerl on Linux

If you installed ActivePerl using the AS format installer, remove the directory into which ActivePerl was installed. For example:

sudo /bin/rm -rf /opt/ActivePerl-5.24