Display common "tuple" rendition of Perl $] variable

[Intrepid]

I don't know how "cool" this is (it's cool to me) but this is a small script I wrote 13 years ago. It simply converts and prints out the Perl version contained in the built-in variable $] to the string as we usually see it when we are discussing Perl releases. Just run it, you'll see what I mean ;-).

#!/usr/bin/env perl

# First created: 2012-05-08
# Last modified: 2012-08-26T01:37:48 UTC-04:00

use strict;
my $pow = 2;
my $test_v = $ARGV[0] || $];
my @qiu = split(q/[._]/ => $test_v);
@qiu[1 .. @qiu] = map {sprintf(q[%u],$_/10**$pow++)}
                    map {unpack "A4 A4",$_ * 10**3 } @qiu[1 .. $#qiu];
my $tuple_perlversion = join q[.], grep{length($_)} @qiu;

print "$tuple_perlversion\n";

    Soren

Jul 12, 2025 at 17:07 UTC

[LanX]

Alternatively

$ perl -E'say $^V'
v5.38.2
$ perl -E'printf "%vd\n", $^V;'
5.38.2
$

see $PERL_VERSION

[ikegami]

And for the version of things other than the current interpreter, one can use the version module.

$ perl -Mv5.14 -e'
   use version qw( );
   say version->parse( "5.040000" )->normal;
'
v5.40.0

(Also accepts a number as input, such as 5.040000 aka 5.04.)