Solaris, perl, and CPAN

Today I finally ran up against a problem that I’ve been avoiding for some time. You see, I have the misfortune for working at an organization that has standardized on Solaris, whose time came and went some time ago (like we really needed Oracle’s acquisition to put the final nail in the coffin). This causes problems with me, because I like to code in bash when I can, and perl otherwise. Call me old fashioned, but that’s how I roll.

The big problem is that Solaris ships with a perl that has been Solaris-ized, one effect of which is that it relies on those compilers when doing any C/C++ based work when installing modules. This is due to the fact that perl knows what compiler it was installed with and that’s what it uses. The problem is that not all of our machines have the Sun compilers on them, and honestly, the Sun compilers suck (I’m spoiled from years on Linux, really).

How I’ve gotten around this in the past is to hit up Sunfreeware, or compile things by hand, and build a bitchin’ /usr/local tree. Did I mention I was spoiled on Linux? I just don’t have the fortitude for such drudgery these days. However, faced with having to do some perl programming on a Solaris box without much in /usr/local, save for gcc, I found myself smacked in the face with this problem, and that’s when I found perlgcc.

perlgcc is quite easy to use; all it does is front-end perl by levering the levers and switching the switches that are need to get perl to believe it should use gcc as its compiler. Then, all you need to do is run perlgcc -MCPAN -e shell and you’re in a workable CPAN environment. Module yourself to your heart’s content at this point.

Big shout out to whoever came up with perlgcc!!

-c