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PERL5 remanents in some modules

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PERL5 remanents in some modules
Gossamer guys and gals.... if your ISP updates to Perl 5.8 you MAY have problems.
A bunch of the CGI scripts in this system have #!/usr/bin/perl5 hard coded.

Perl 5.8 doesn't not like the 5 in Perl5. It considers it a 'downgrade'?

Anyway...I had to go through all my Gforum directories and check every CGI and PL file.
Those that had Perl5 were changed to just Perl..and all is working again properly.

MySqlMan and FileMan were effected as well and this simple edit fixed everything.

Apparently this has never been a problem in Perl in past revisions, but it is NOW!

Thanks for your patience with me. This was a bit of a tuffy to figure out!

See posts # 257503

http://www.gossamer-threads.com/...;;page=unread#unread
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Re: [ptegler] PERL5 remanents in some modules In reply to
Hi,

This should be set during the install. Perl is located in different areas on different systems.

Maybe during your install, when prompted for the path to perl the prompt was /usr/bin/perl5, rather than usr/bin/perl

There is a simple command you can issue from a telnet window if you can get to your server that will show files with the errorneous lines, and another you can use to patch them.

I won't dare post the commands <G> but I think they have been posted before, and if not, you can find them on the net with "perl one liners" or similar search keys. I just don't want to be responsible for any damages done ;)

My point -- it's not an issue with GT, but it may affect some people in your situation *BUT* you don't have to search and edit each file manually.


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Re: [pugdog] PERL5 remanents in some modules In reply to
yep...I understand your points completely. But in this case...on a Forum system running for well over a year now...the ISP had upgraded their Perl installation to Perl 5.8. So the current remanents of Perl5 statements in some of the modules was the problem. Not all the modules say Perl5, most were Perl, but a few are Perl5. Perl 5.8 sees these as a 'downgrade' and they will not run properly under Perl5.8.

Goss admin know about this (and had responded on the subject) and will make sure any new updates to the Fourm code will not contain any Perl5 statements.
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Re: [ptegler] PERL5 remanents in some modules In reply to
The ISP is partly to blame here - they should have removed the perl5 executable, or at least copied the 5.8.2 executable over top of it as the perl5 executable was left over from the old Perl installation. The reason, as I think I mentioned, for using perl5 before perl was that on some older systems /usr/bin/perl was actually Perl 4, and /usr/bin/perl5 was the Perl 5.x version. Apparently, the Perl devs decided it's been long enough, and no longer include a perl5 binary - as I mentioned, I've updated all the scripts so that new installs will attempt to use perl before perl5.

Jason Rhinelander
Gossamer Threads
jason@gossamer-threads.com