Assignment 2

 

INSTALLATION OF PERL 5.005_02

 

Introduction & Summary: (Travis Angle & Adam Fuller)

Perl stands for the "Practical Extraction Report Language" and is an interpreted language which can be run on many platforms but was initially intended for Unix. Perl has built in functions for simple manipulations of processes and files. It has become the most popular language for writing scripts for the World Wide Web to generate dynamic pages and process forms. Perl version 5.004 was installed with the Linux OS.  We decided since 5.004 was an old version that we would delete it out of the system and install the newer version 5.005_2. This was essential since our next install is going to be the Apache server with the mod_perl patch.

In order to install the mod_perl portion of the server we needed Perl on our system. Also we found that we wanted to learn how to install Perl. Adam had already installed the mod_perl module with the Apache server but the rest of the group was unaware of how he installed the software. Therefore we deleted mod_perl and the Apache server from our system. Upon reinstalling both the mod_perl and Apache the libraries for the mod_perl were still installed. This made the install overly simple as the system already had the configurations. In order for us to be able to install the mod_perl module with the Apache from scratch we purged the system of the old perl version to get rid of the libraries.  After doing this we installed the Perl 5.005_2.

 

Narrative: (we ftp all tar.gz files into /usr/local/src) (Rajiv Zutshi)

1.    ftp the latest per tar.gz file from www.perl.com   (perl5.005_02.tar.gz)

2.    We unzipped perl5.005_02.tar.gz in /usr/local/src

3.    cd perl5.005_02

4.    We then read the install instructions in the INSTALL file and proceeded with the installation

rm -f config.sh
sh Configure
make
make test
make install
make clean.   

5.    The 'make clean' command cleaned up all object files (*.o) files that were created during the installation process.

6.    The perl was actually installed in the /usr/bin/ directory.   This was interesting as we imagined that the installation would have defaulted to the /usr/local/bin directory instead.  Nevertheless, we decided to test out our perl installation by writing a short perl script as outlined below:

 

Functionality: (Roger Smith)

We installed perl5.005_2 into our /usr/bin directory. We encountered no problems along the way. We obtained the zipped file from www.perl.com and just did the usual process of gunzipping it and intalling perl. Once the program was installed under /us/bin/perl we then tested our installation by writing a simple perl script. A "Hello World" script. The script was as follows:

#!/usr/bin/perl

print "Hello Wolrd";

We saved this script as testperl.pl and then tried to run it but had some problems which we determined to be some permission errors. So we changed the permissions on the file by typing chmod 755 testperl.pl then at the command line we typed ....

./testperl.pl

and the script worked!!!!