Wednesday, June 20, 2007

HP-UX Perl

This is a quick guide to using Perl on HP-UX and installing the interfaces to an Oracle database and MS Excel output.
In some environments it may be difficult to have additional Perl modules installed by the system administrators. This guide will take advantage of the default Perl installation, and install additional module as a non-root end user.

Perl source code can be downloaded and compiled. It is often more convenient to download a precompiled binary. Recent versions (11 and 11i) of HP-UX include Perl, which is a sufficient start for most scripting.

Determine your version of HP-UX with the uname command:
$ uname -a
HP-UX hostname B.11.11 U 9000/800 2155931687 unlimited-user license


The Perl interpreter may already be in your PATH environment variable:
$ which perl
/usr/bin/perl


/usr/bin/perl is a soft link to /opt/perl.
$ ls -l /usr/bin/perl
lrwxr-xr-x 1 bin bin 18 Sep 28 2005 /usr/bin/perl -> /opt/perl/bin/perl


There is also an /opt/perl_64.
$ ls -ld /opt/perl*
dr-xr-xr-x 6 bin bin 96 Sep 28 2005 /opt/perl
dr-xr-xr-x 6 bin bin 96 Sep 28 2005 /opt/perl_64


Determine the version.

$ perl -v

This is perl, v5.8.2 built for PA-RISC1.1-thread-multi
(with 25 registered patches, see perl -V for more detail)

Copyright 1987-2003, Larry Wall

Binary build 808 provided by ActiveState Corp. http://www.ActiveState.com
ActiveState is a division of Sophos.
Built May 3 2005 14:06:55
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"perl -V" will display details of what was compiled.