Re: Installing Perl 5.6.1 on WinDoze 98

[archen]

For some reason I've never liked Active State, although it seems every (Windows) user but me uses it. Personally I went with Indigo Perl. My first use of Perl on Windows was using some distro I found on a Netscape page (yeah, no kidding!), and I found myself more comfortable with the Indigo distro. With Indigo there is no install, you just unzip it and the tree comes out wherever you put it (probably best to put it under C:\perl\ ) - and it's ready to go right out of the box.

The main thing about Active state is that it does a lot of integration with Win98, which a lot of people like. Me, I like good'ol honest DOS programs. You can set up some helpful things yourself though.

1) Add perl to the path in "C:\autoexec.bat"
SET PATH=C:\perl\bin\;~~~~ other stuff ~~~~~~

2) Make a perl script right click runable.
In Windows explorer you can go to options and select the file types tab. Select New type
for an extension you can enter .pl or .cgi (or just make two associations for both) In actions hit the new button and enter something like.
Action: "Run Perl Script"
Application used to perform this action. "C:\perl\bin\perl.exe %1"
If you make this action the "default action" it will automatically run when you double click it. You can add other actions too, like "Edit" and send it to notepad and such.

Well if you're lost with this crumby explanation, never mind I guess. A lot of people say it's lame to run perl on windows, but when your forced to use windows (work *cough cough*) Perl is handy. I mean batch files are weak, and windows doesn't let you automate anything reasonably. I have my windows box duct taped together with Perl...