Perl free downloads

To install your own on Linux, you can go the ActiveState route as above, or also use the Homebrew package manager. There are several requirements to install first , and then you can follow the directions for installing Homebrew and issue the command brew install perl. You can download it directly and build a version yourself, after installing any prerequisite packages used to build software on your operating system see below.

However, most Perl developers choose to use a tool to automate that process and manage different versions of Perl side-by-side. Enter perlbrew. Perlbrew requires an already-installed system version of Perl, but it can be as old as 5. Installing older versions of Perl and switching between them use the same steps, e. I use an alternative, plenv , which uses a different mechanism to manage versions of Perl using the bash command shell.

Windows users have the option of berrybrew , which acts much like perlbrew for Strawberry Perl with slightly different options. On most Unix-like systems including macOS , you can then configure, build, test, and install Perl by issuing the following commands:. Now head on over to Perl. Mark helps professional Perl developers to engineer modern, disciplined applications in the cloud so that they can become experts that write easy-to-maintain code with confidence.

He blogs at PhoenixTrap. This might happen frequently on a home machine, but less often in corporations andon servers. They tend to upgrade only after a years delay. In some cases the delay can be even longer. This means that the so called system Perl on Linux distributions will be a few years out of date. Out of the box it allows web development with Perl Dancer framework.

There is a post on how toget started with Perl Dancer. It also includes modules to read and write Microsoft Excel files and it comes with a lot more extensions. In the first episode of the Perl Tutorial I explained, and in the screencastshowed, how to install Perl on Windows. Another Perl distribution for Windows is ActivePerl. It was created by ActiveState. It is recommended ifyou are planning to buy a support or redistribution license.

Yet another distribution is Citrus Perl. It is especially interestingif you are planning to build a cross-platform desktop application for Windows, Linux and Mac OSX. It includeswxPerl, the Perlwrapper of wxWidgets on all 3 platforms. Upgrading of these Perl distributions for Windows usually involves removing the old ones and installing a new one.

Then installing all the additional modules. Every modern Linux distribution comes with perl already installed. In some cases it is not the full packagethat was released by the Perl 5 Porters, and in most cases it is not the most recent version either.

Being a bit out of date would not be a problem, but in some cases you will be stuck with a years old version of Perl. You will encounter such cases especially in Linux distributions with long support policy. For examplethe Long Term Support of Ubuntu.

Of course, every software in those distributions is very old, not only Perl. Stability has a price! One of the drawbacks of having an old version of Perl is that there might be CPAN modulesthat don't support that version of Perl any more.

To get started with Perl it will be OK to use the one that came with the operating system,but at one point you might want to install the newest version of Perl. We will go deeper in thisissue in another article, but for now it is enough to say that this became very easy recently with thedevelopment of Perlbrew. In some Linux distributions not all 'standard' Perl is included by default. Learn more about ActiveState Perl.

Recommended Version. Windows: ActivePerl 5. Frequently Asked Questions. Is this Perl download free?