CPAN/ports

Note that CPAN does not build these packages: we just provide the hyperlinks. Also, this page lists operating systems, not hardware platforms: therefore Perl packages for, say, Linux PDAs or SONY Playstation, or XBox, or Tivo, or toasters, or so forth running Linux are not "ports" as such.

Corrections? Additions? Suggestions? Please contact cpan@@perl.org. Other questions? See the CPAN FAQ.

Use The Source

If you are on a UNIX, I strongly suggest that you compile Perl yourself from the source code distribution. This way you always get the latest Perl and you can configure Perl as you like and you avoid the security risks inherent in installing binary distributions. If you are on Windows or MacOS, and you do not think you have any special needs, you will probably be perfectly happy with a binary build. See also the disclaimer. If you have UNIX, or Windows, MS-DOS, VMS, Amiga, QNX, Plan9, MPE/iX, OS/390, BeOS, and a C compilation environment, you should be all set for compilation, the source code kit contains the compilation instructions. For Macintosh you need a little bit more. If your platform is something else, read on.

Some architectures also have available binary distributions for the most useful and popular Perl modules (such as Tk, MD5, GD). Some of the Perl binary distributions include such module distributions. For some architectures I also list sites that have other useful (but unrelated-to-Perl) software available. You can for example try finding C compilers (gcc/egcs is available on many platforms) or archival and compression tools (what to do about .tar.gz, for example).

AIX

Starting from AIX 4.3.3 Perl 5 ships standard with AIX. (Perl 5.005_03 with AIX 4.3.3.)

As of Perl 5.7.2 the AtheOS support is part of the standard Perl, but in case you want a binary package (also other software available)

BeOS

As of BeOS 5.0 or late March 2000, Perl 5.005_03 is available as a standard but optional component.

Starting from Perl 5.005 the BeOS support has been integrated to the Perl standard source code distribution. But if you insist on a potentially obsolete binary:

BSD

BSDI BSD/OS

Perl has always been a standard component of BSD/OS. As of BSD/OS 4.1 or December 1999, Perl 5.005_03 is included.

Cygwin

The easiest way to install Perl in Cygwin is simply to use the standard Cygwin installation utility. Just follow the link and click on the "Install Cygwin now" icon. It will first ask questions about where to install and from where to install, and then you'll get to select what to install/update.

DEC OSF/1 / Digital UNIX / Tru64

Data General DG/UX

Since DG/UX R4.20MU04 ships with Perl 5. NIS on OS depends on a dgadm.pl library, one needs to be careful before overwriting /usr/bin/perl if upgrading.

Data General

Digital UNIX

Sequent DYNIX/ptx

As of DYNIX/ptx 4.5.0 or September 1999, Perl 5.005_03 is a standard component.

FreeBSD

Tandem/Compaq/HP Guardian

HP/Compaq/Digital/Tandem

HP-UX

Starting from mid-October 2001 Perl 5.6.1 is shipped as a standard part of HP-UX 11.00 installation.

Recent Perl binaries for HP-UX 10.20 and 11.00 in compressed tar (no depots) including recent versions of modules like DBI and Tk. All Perls are prepared to build DBD-Oracle (Perl needs to be linked with certain libraries). This site has a lot of HP-UX Perl related information.

IBM

SGI IRIX

Starting from IRIX 6.4 Perl 5 ships standard with IRIX. (Perl 5.004_04 with IRIX 6.5, but see below for fresher versions.)

Japanese

(No, Japanese is not a new operating system. We just list "Japanized" versions of Perl here.)

JPerl

JPerl is a port of the Perl 5 that can handle the Japanese legacy encodings Japanese EUC and Shift-JIS (aka MS-Kanji).

NOTE! As of Perl 5.8.0 it is suggested that instead of JPerl (which is based on a quite old release of Perl) you should just use Perl 5.8.0, since it can do all that JPerl did, and more. With the source code kit of Perl 5.8.0 comes the README.jp file, which details the capabilities. When Perl 5.8.0 gets installed, the file gets installed as perljp, so perldoc or man or equivalents should be able to find it.

MacJPerl

Linux

Many people ask for "Perl for RedHat / SuSE / Mandrake / Debian / Slackware / Gentoo / LinuxPPC / OpenLinux / TurboLinux / RockLinux / Yellow Dog Linux / LFS / WhateverLinuxDistribution?" Well...

If your Linux distribution doesn't already contain a reasonably recent Perl release (as of July 2002, Perl 5.8.0 is just out, and 5.6.1 has been out since April 2001), are you certain you have chosen a good distribution? A distribution that contains essential tools like Perl? A distribution that keeps its packages up-to-date?
For a long time I tried maintaining the links to the Perl distributions of at least the major Linux distributions but that turned out to be rather frustrating exercise because the vendors/organizations seem to be restructuring their sites constantly.
You have Linux, which means that you have a full compilation environment, which means you can use the source code.

Perl is known to be a standard component of the following distributions:

Debian: 5.005_03 since Debian 2.2, 5.004_04 since 2.1
RedHat: 5.005_03 since RedHat 6.0 or April 19, 1999
Slackware: 5.004_04 since Slackware 2.5 or June 1998
SuSE: 5.6.1 as of SuSE 7.3

There are Perl IDEs available for Linux. Firstly, there are the usual UNIX IDEs. Then there are various IDEs originating from Win32 but also available in Linux:

LynxOS

Starting from Perl 5.005 the LynxOS support has been integrated to the Perl standard source code distribution. But if you insist on a potentially obsolete binary:

Macintosh

Mac OS Classic (pre-X)

MacPerl support is included in perl, in releases later than 5.6.1. The current release of MacPerl is based on 5.6.1. Mac OS 8.1 or better is required, although the previous version (5.2.0r4) and the MPW tool may be used on Mac OS 7.5.5 or better. For older Mac OS versions, see MacPerl 4.1.8, all in the ports/mac/ directory.

The MacPerl application comes with a simple 32k text editor/IDE. The MPW Perl tool can use the MPW shell which has no 32k limit. BBEdit and BBEdit Lite are text editors with Perl modes (works both for Mac OS Classic and Mac OS X). Also the shareware Alpha editor has Perl mode.

MacJPerl

MacJPerl is (as of August 2002) based on older port of MacPerl (which was based on Perl 5.004), and the JPerl patches (which were based on Perl 5.005).

Mac OS X

Mac OS X ships with Perl 5.6 as a standard component (Perl 5.6.0 as of OS X 10.2).

Tenon MachTen

MinGW

MinGW is a collection of header files and import libraries that allow one to use GCC and produce native Windows32 programs.

Minix

MPE/iX

First of all, go to the Perl/iX home page. Starting from Perl 5.005 the MPE/iX support has been integrated to the Perl standard source code distribution. But if you insist on a potentially obsolete binary:

MiNT

MS-DOS

Starting from Perl 5.005 the MS-DOS support has been integrated to the Perl standard source code distribution. But if you insist on a binary:

NetBSD

Novell NetWare

NetWare sources for Perl 5.8 has been integrated with the Perl standard source code distribution.

The Perl for NetWare binaries are available on the Novell NDK site site and at the following location, too: http://www.cpan.org/ports/netware/ (you probably are already there). Once you subscribe to the NDK you can download many other NDK components. The NDK site contains useful documentation and installation instructions.

For information on how to build modules and related information, please visit the NDK site or refer to the README that are part of the standard distribution.

mod_perl, perl MySQL and other extensions to Perl are available as part of the NDK Perl 5.8 download. Additional Perl modules that are not part of the NetWare binaries can be downloaded from CPAN.

NextStep

OpenBSD

Perl has always been a standard component of formal OpenBSD releases. OpenBSD 2.7 ships with Perl 5.6.

Tandem/Compaq NonStop/NonStop-UX

Starting from Perl 5.8.0 the NonStop-UX support is integrated to the Perl standard source code distribution.

OS1100

IBM OS/2

IBM OS/400

Perl 5.005_03, Perl-DBD, Perl-DBI, and several other development and programming tools are available as iSeries Tools for Developers PRPQ 5799-PTL.

PalmOS

Plan 9

Go to the Bell labs Plan9 site and click on the "Additional Software", which will have among other things a Perl 5.004_05. Note that you'll have accept the Plan9 license before getting to the additional software.

PowerMAX

Starting from Perl 5.005 the PowerMAX support has been integrated to the Perl standard source code distribution. But if you insist on a binary:

PrimOS

EPOC Psion

Though in principle Symbian is the same OS as EPOC, unfortunately the above port will not run on Symbian.

QNX

Fujitsu-Siemens ReliantUNIX

Since SINIX 5.43 or 1997 Perl 5.003 has shipped as a standard component. That is really old, you will either want to compile from the sources or use the following:

Acorn RISCOS

Please note that this is the Acorn RISCOS, not the MIPS RISC-OS (for the latter, just use the source code distribution).

Starting from Solaris 8 Perl 5 ships standard with Solaris. (Perl 5.005_03 with Solaris 8.)

Stratus

Tandem/Compaq

Tru64

Starting from Tru64 V5.0 Perl 5 ships standard with Tru64 as /usr/bin/perl, but the runtime support (modules and documentation) are in a separate optional subset. (As of Tru64 V5.0 5.004_04, but 5.005_03 is on the supplementary freeware CD-ROM.)

UNIX

Traditionally UNIX was synonomous with C and a C compiler. You should be able to take any platform that calls itself UNIX and compile Perl on it without problems from the source code. (If this fails, your vendor is likely to be cheating you by not supplying you with a fully functional ANSI-capable compiler. They call this an "unbundled" compiler and "progress", too, by giving the customer "more options", in other words, making you pay more.) Therefore, nowadays, for various reasons, people do ask for binary distributions.

For debugging Perl, there is of course the standard Perl debugger itself. If the command line is not your bag, there are various graphical frontends:

U/WIN

VMS

Since September 1995 VMS 6.2 Perl has been on the Freeware CD (part of the standard installation). As of Freeware 5.0 the Perl release is 5.005_03. There are also builds by vmsperl folks (non-Compaq) builds available at

Stratus VOS

Starting from Perl 5.005_03 the VOS support has been integrated to the Perl standard source code distribution. Since June 2002, Stratus supplies a fully-supported copy of Perl 5.6.1 in Release 2.0.1 of their GNU C++ & GNU Tools product, which runs on the Continuum product line and requires VOS Release 14.5.0 or later. If you do not wish to build Perl from source, or cannot meet the prerequisites for this product, or need a newer release of Perl, you can obtain binaries of Perl from Stratus:

VxWorks

WinCE / Pocket PC

Win31

Win95 / Win98 / WinME / WinNT / Win2000/W2K / WinXP (Win32)

Starting from Perl 5.005 the Win32 support has been integrated to the Perl standard source code distribution. But if you insist on a binary:

These two are very obsolete and no more maintained or updated. Use only if you know that you need these.

(Especially) if you are accustomed to Windows you might be interested in various IDEs for Perl, in alphabetical order:

or shell environments (the first three are full UNIX tool environments, tcsh and zsh are just the shell).

MinGW is a collection of header files and import libraries that allow one to use GCC and produce native Windows32 programs.

These are ports of UNIX-like environments for Win32, which are useful for compiling Perl (and at least Cygwin contains Perl as an installable package).

IBM z/OS (OS/390)

Starting from Perl 5.005_02 the OS/390 (also known as OS/390, also known as Open Edition, also known as MVS) support has been integrated to the Perl standard source code distribution.

NOTE! As of July 2002, the Perl 5.8.0 source builds and tests at better than 99% on z/OS (OS/390). (The previous version, 5.6.1, didn't work well on EBCDIC platforms.)

Disclaimer

The inclusion or exclusion of any site, application, or product does not represent any special endorsement or discrimination, nor is any attempt at comprehensiveness made, just an educated guess at which ones could possibly be useful.

Installing software is always a security risk, installing binary distributions doubly so.

None of the CPAN maintainers, Perl developers or contributors, or any entities publishing this list in any media, will be liable for any damage caused by the transfer, storage, installation, or use of these distributions. It's your risk alone.

IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR DISTRIBUTORS BE LIABLE TO ANY PARTY FOR DIRECT, INDIRECT, SPECIAL, INCIDENTAL, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES ARISING OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, ITS DOCUMENTATION, OR ANY DERIVATIVES THEREOF, EVEN IF THE AUTHORS HAVE BEEN ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.

THE AUTHORS AND DISTRIBUTORS SPECIFICALLY DISCLAIM ANY WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, AND NON-INFRINGEMENT. THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED ON AN ``AS IS'' BASIS, AND THE AUTHORS AND DISTRIBUTORS HAVE NO OBLIGATION TO PROVIDE MAINTENANCE, SUPPORT, UPDATES, ENHANCEMENTS, OR MODIFICATIONS.

Corrections? Additions? Suggestions? Please contact cpan@@perl.org. Other questions? See the CPAN FAQ.