GDBM and Perl 5.6.1

[JAG]

Hi. We're running Perl 5.6.1 on a Solaris 9 box.
We need GDBM support but it's not installed.
I can't find a standalone module on CPAN - it only seems
to come bundled with Perl 5.8.x.

Does anybody know either:
1) why my Perl 5.6.1 doesn't have GDBM and whether I can install it?
2) where I can get a standalone GDBM module?

Solaris 9 comes with Perl and I suspect that rebuilding Perl would be a really
bad idea. Is this suspicion correct?

Thanks in advance for your help.

 

[Ben Morrow]

Hi. We're running Perl 5.6.1 on a Solaris 9 box.
We need GDBM support but it's not installed.
I can't find a standalone module on CPAN - it only seems
to come bundled with Perl 5.8.x.

Does anybody know either:
1) why my Perl 5.6.1 doesn't have GDBM and whether I can install it?
2) where I can get a standalone GDBM module?

If you donwload the perl-5.8.2 tarball and take the GDBM_File
directory out of the ext/ directory, you should be able to install
that with your perl.

Ben

 

[Joe Smith]

Solaris 9 comes with Perl and I suspect that rebuilding Perl would be a really
bad idea. Is this suspicion correct?

Incorrect.

It is a bad idea to overwrite or replace /usr/perl5/*, but perfectly
reasonable to "rm /usr/bin/perl; ln -s /usr/local/bin/perl /usr/bin".
The vendor supplied scripts all use /usr/perl5/bin/perl, which means
it is OK to install a newer one from www.sunfreeware.com.

solaris9% /usr/perl5/bin/perl -v
This is perl, v5.6.1 built for sun4-solaris-64int
solaris9% perl -v
This is perl, v5.8.3 built for sun4-solaris

The latter was compiled with gcc instead of Sun's C compiler.
-Joe