http://www.perlmonks.org?node_id=581082

carcassonne has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Following on my recent question about running Perl on a USB key, I'd like to ask about what would constitute a minimal Perl installation that could only run one prgram that only uses:

use warnings; use strict; use File::Copy; use File::Path;

This is a bootable Linux USB key that is used to perform upgrades.

So, now my approach is to use a freshly-made LFS (Linux From Scratch) system from which I extract the configured kernel and the needed system binaries and libs (bare minimum since on each I run ldd and only include what's really needed on the USB key).

So the OS/boot part is covered. I could simply copy the whole Perl installation that's part of LFS to the USB key, but it'd be nice to save some space.

So what's really, really needed to run Perl ? I can ldd the perl executable, so that's OK. But what about all the other files ? Config.pm seems important. Architecture will the same i686 (but then, would it be possible to boot on a i586 platform and Perl could still find all its required files ?).

I surely need the warnings, strict, File::Copy and File::Path modules. What else ?

Any suggestions/ideas welcomed, Al