May I use Strawberry Perl and ActiveState Perl simultaneously on one computer?

Question

I used to delete my ActivePerl once, and all the installed modules were lost. So now I am very careful with this kind of issue. Due to some reason, I want to use Strawberry Perl now, while keeping ActiveState's ActivePerl in use.

Will this cause compatibility issues? Is it advisable?

Re *"Due to some reason"*: Do you mean *"Due to the same reason"*? — Peter Mortensen, Dec 08 '19 at 18:35

score 5 · Answer 1 · edited Dec 08 '19 at 18:43

5

This will not be a problem as both the Perl implementations will look at different directories for modules. That is, the @INC entries will be different.

edited Dec 08 '19 at 18:43

Peter Mortensen

28,342
21
95
123

answered Apr 02 '12 at 08:43

Alan Haggai Alavi

67,398
19
96
124

Thanks for your clarifications! So if in the environmental path Active State perl has priority and I want to use Strawberry one, then how should I do? May I do like what 'Saiful' said, in the perl script specifying #!C:\strawberry\perl\bin\perl? Or is there a more advised solution? Thank you! – Qiao Zhou Apr 02 '12 at 10:00

score 3 · Answer 2 · edited Dec 08 '19 at 18:45

3

I keep both ActivePerl and Strawberry Perl installed on my Windows 7 Pro instance. My PATH variable order decides my Perl preference. E.g, for using ActivePerl I set my PATH to something like this:

C:\Perl64\bin;C:\strawberry\perl\bin

You can always override this in your script using shebang:

#!C:\strawberry\perl\bin\perl

edited Dec 08 '19 at 18:45

Peter Mortensen

28,342
21
95
123

answered Apr 02 '12 at 08:50

Saiful

144
2

Thank you! This really helps. I will try this now. – Qiao Zhou Apr 02 '12 at 09:35
If I recall correctly the shebang is ignored in windows. Am I correct? – user1126070 Apr 11 '12 at 08:04
It is ignored by windows, but when the default perl gets to parse the file it will then pass control to the program mentioned in the shebang line. – justintime Aug 02 '13 at 20:27

score 2 · Answer 3 · edited Dec 08 '19 at 18:42

2

You could use two (many) different Perl versions at once.

Set your PATH variable to include your primary Perl path (path to perl.exe) to be sure that you are running the correct Perl when you start a program with perl script.pl.

You could use Perlbrew (or other modules) to help keeping multiple Perl installations on your computer.

It is available on Windows: http://code.activestate.com/ppm/App-perlbrew/

edited Dec 08 '19 at 18:42

Peter Mortensen

28,342
21
95
123

answered Apr 02 '12 at 08:41

user1126070

4,999
1
14
14

AS version requires Business Edition Perl. There's now [berrybrew](https://github.com/dnmfarrell/berrybrew) tool available for Strawberry Perl. – flamey Feb 11 '15 at 21:52

score 0 · Answer 4 · edited Dec 08 '19 at 18:47

I found another solution for this. You could embed your Perl code into a Windows batch file. This way you could set environment variables before executing your Perl script or include your module path.

@echo off
cd %TEMP%
set perl_bindir=C:\strawberry\perl\bin
set module_dir=C:\my_perl_modules
set path=%perl_bindir%;%path%

echo Launching %0 perl script

%perl_bindir%\perl.exe -I %module_dir% -x -S %0 %*
goto endofperl

#!perl -w

use strict;
print "Hello World\n";

__END__
:endofperl

May I use Strawberry Perl and ActiveState Perl simultaneously on one computer?

4 Answers4