Install Latest Perl 5.18 – CentOS 6.4

Change your directory to /usr/local/src

Head over to cpan.org and download the latest stable release of Perl

Copy the download link and issue the following at shell to start pulling the archive

wget http://search.cpan.org/CPAN/authors/id/R/RJ/RJBS/perl-5.18.2.tar.bz2

You’ll need wget so install it if you don’t have it already

yum install wget

Issue the following command to extract the archive, make sure you replace the file name with the one you downloaded

tar -xvf tar -xvf perl-5.18.2.tar.bz2

Move inside the newly extracted directory

cd perl-5.18.2

Initiate Configure before the install

./Configure -des

Note: Configure failed saying it couldn’t find C, straight forward fix. Let’s throw the kitchen sink at it

yum groupinstall "Development Tools"

Re run Configure and this time it should complete without complaint

To install issue the following

make
make install

Issue the following after make install completes to verify that perl has indeed updated successfully

perl -v

You should see something like the following