Installing Perl on NT

This page is grossly outdated. Like, circa 1998 or so, if that late. Please don't contact me for support on the stuff here. I haven't touched Windows NT for almost ten years. I'm not at all sure that ActiveState is the preferred Perl any more - I think it's probably not.

1. Get Perl from ActiveState
2. Run the installation program. I generally recommend that you install ActivePerl in c:\usr rather than in the default location of c:\perl My reason for this is simply portability. If you have Perl on your Unix machine at /usr/bin/perl and you have Perl on your NT machine somewhere other than that, you will need to change the #! line on every Perl rogram that you move from Unix to NT, and vice versa.

   Of course, if you are using a shell, or a web server, that does not recognize the #! line, perhaps this does not matter to you.

   The thing that takes the longest to install is the documentation. Perl programs contain documentation in the code, and during the install, HTML documentation is generated from the various programs. It takes quite a while to open up each file and generate the docs from that file.

3. That's it. You are now ready to use Perl. Open a DOS window, and type "perl -v" to convince yourself that Perl is correctly installed. You should see something like:

   C:\WINDOWS>perl -v
   
   This is perl, version 5.005_02 built for MSWin32-x86-object
   (with 1 registered patch, see perl -V for more detail)
   
   Copyright 1987-1998, Larry Wall
   
   Binary build 509 provided by ActiveState Tool Corp. http://www.ActiveState.com
   Built 13:37:15 Jan  5 1999
   
   
   Perl may be copied only under the terms of either the Artistic License or the
   GNU General Public License, which may be found in the Perl 5.0 source kit.
   
   Complete documentation for Perl, including FAQ lists, should be found on
   this system using `man perl' or `perldoc perl'.  If you have access to the
   Internet, point your browser at http://www.perl.com/, the Perl Home Page.