Adding a directory to @INC permenantly

[jonjacobmoon]

Seems like this should be a basic question but I have not been able to find an easy answer: how do I add to @INC permanently? I see that I can change the PERLLIB environmentaly variable but where do I do that? It is not clear.

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I admit it, I am Paco.

[wil]

You may be interested in a few suggestions offered in a recent thread on this topic. Specifically, look for mikfire's dirty hack which seems to work.

For more information on PERL5LIB, or PERLLIB if PERL5IB is not defined, take a look at perldoc perlrun.

Hope this helps.

- wil

[merlyn]

But that suggestion doesn't work, for reasons I outlined in my followup.

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker

[Aristotle]

If this is a Unix system and the scripts are run by the webserver, you will need root access; then you can add the variable to /etc/profile. If you run the scripts yourself (or a program you started does), then you might simply add the variable to your .profile or .bashrc or whatever.

Makeshifts last the longest.

[jonjacobmoon]

Doh! Of course, frustration, late nights, and plain stupidity got the best of me :) Thanks, Aristotle.

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I admit it, I am Paco.

[perrin]

Where do you change an environment variable? In your shell. That won't help with CGI scripts though, since they don't run as you.

By far the best way to do this is by compiling perl with your customized lib path. Look at the install docs for instructions.

[jdavidboyd]

Perl FAQ 8 offers the following, under the question of:

How do I add a directory to my include path at runtime?

Here are the suggested ways of modifying your include path:

   the PERLLIB environment variable
   the PERL5LIB environment variable
   the perl -Idir command line flag
   the use lib pragma, as in
      use lib "$ENV{HOME}/myown_perllib";

The latter is particularly useful because it knows about machine dependent architectures. The lib.pm pragmatic module was first included with the 5.002 release of Perl.

Myself, I go for the perl -Idir version.