Upgrading Perl

[Morris Makuch]

I want to upgrade Perl from 4.0.1.8 to 5.6.1 on HP-UX 10.20. I am very unfamiliar with Perl and am not sure of the implications this may have. The only applications I have running on the server are Oracle7, M/C Serviceguard, Measureware, and ARCserve agent. Do I have to be aware of anything or do anything special to upgrade. Thanks

[A. Clay Stephenson]

Hi Morris,

The good news is that binary distributions are available so that you need do nothing special
other than setting up a symbolic link from /opt/perl5/bin/perl to /usr/bin/perl. (Assuming a typical installation). Your existing perl scripts should be upward compatible with 5.6.x. The only time I have seen problems is when the programmer put in explicit paths (e.g. /usr/contrib/perl/lib) which is bad form. Even in this rate event, the problems are obvious. You should have no
problems and 5.6.x many more features and functions. I can typically run the same perl 5.6.x scripts on both UNIX and NT/W2K.

Regards, Clay