Hello fionbarr,
As I pointed out previously, you don’t have to take any chances. Just download the Strawberry Perl PortableZIP edition appropriate to your OS (i.e., 32- or 64-bit) and unzip it to a suitable directory. Then, to run this new version of Perl, double click on the file portableshell.bat. Enter perl -v from the command line to verify that the Perl you are using is the one from Strawberry Perl. Install any modules you need locally (i.e. for this version only) by running cpanm from this command line.
You can then test your existing scripts on the new Strawberry Perl version. If they don’t work, and you can’t get them to work (for whatever reason), you have lost nothing but a bit of time — your existing ActivePerl is still installed and will still work the same as it always did.
Hope that helps,
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Both can be installed on the same system. (I have a dozen versions of ActiverPerl on this system, though no Strawberry Perl.)
You might want to adjust your PATH and your file associations to affect which perl gets executed when you enter perl at the prompt or double-click on the .pl file.
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You won't be making any code changes, you're replacing one Perl with another. If you're concerned take a backup of your existing environment before removing and replacing ActiveState perl. You can run AS and Strawberry Perl one the same system quite happily, provided you don't get confused very easily.
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I think that the biggest concern will be the library-modules (PERL5LIB equivalent). I know that Windows implementations use registry-keys for this ... I presume that both Strawberry and AS do this and with their own distinct keys. I expect that perl -V, with a capital V, will print out the library search-path as before. What you really want to make sure of is that one Perl implementation doesn’t reference the Perl packages (including underlying XS bits ...) that were built and used by the other. The module installation and configuration process often does a lot of low-level compiling, and I expect that it will be quite specific to this, vs. that, Perl implementation on the same box.
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