Subscribe to
Posts
Comments
NSLog(); Header Image

Perly Gates

My first ever entry was called I Hate Perl. I don't really hate Perl, but man, sometimes I'm just not a big fan. The CLI is fun and fine and all, but today I installed Perl 5.8.0 to try to get Time::HiRes (it worked of course, MTTimer needed it).

Of course, then I got to venture into the lovely world of CPAN. Let's just say I had to force install DBD::mysql. Hrmph. After all that work, NetPBM still doesn't work. Who knows why? MovableType is of no help whatsoever, of course.

What's more, the actual perl files are acting very, very weird. I'll let you look at these and determine what's weird. Pay attention to the file size column. Fwiw, lsf aliases to ls -laF | grep "!:1".

[11:16pm barzeski@~] > cd /usr/local/bin
[11:16pm barzeski@/usr/local/bin] > lsf perl
-rwxr-xr-x   2 root  wheel   884921 May 10 18:12 perl*
-rwxr-xr-x   2 root  wheel   766661 Feb 26 15:38 perl5.6.1*
-rwxr-xr-x   2 root  wheel   884921 May 10 18:12 perl5.8.0*
-rwxr-xr-x   1 root  wheel   766661 May 10 18:12 perl56.bak*
-rwxr-xr-x   1 root  wheel   884921 May 10 17:54 perl58.bak*
[11:16pm barzeski@/usr/local/bin] > sudo cp perl56.bak perl
[11:17pm barzeski@/usr/local/bin] > lsf perl
-rwxr-xr-x   2 root  wheel   766661 May 10 23:17 perl*
-rwxr-xr-x   2 root  wheel   766661 Feb 26 15:38 perl5.6.1*
-rwxr-xr-x   2 root  wheel   766661 May 10 23:17 perl5.8.0*
-rwxr-xr-x   1 root  wheel   766661 May 10 18:12 perl56.bak*
-rwxr-xr-x   1 root  wheel   884921 May 10 17:54 perl58.bak*
[11:17pm barzeski@/usr/local/bin] > sudo cp perl58.bak perl
[11:17pm barzeski@/usr/local/bin] > lsf perl
-rwxr-xr-x   2 root  wheel   884921 May 10 23:17 perl*
-rwxr-xr-x   2 root  wheel   766661 Feb 26 15:38 perl5.6.1*
-rwxr-xr-x   2 root  wheel   884921 May 10 23:17 perl5.8.0*
-rwxr-xr-x   1 root  wheel   766661 May 10 18:12 perl56.bak*
-rwxr-xr-x   1 root  wheel   884921 May 10 17:54 perl58.bak*
[11:17pm barzeski@/usr/local/bin] >

That's very disturbing.

3 Responses to "Perly Gates"

  1. My recent Perly Gates entry made mention of a tcsh alias that I use: lsf. I thought I'd share - with commentary - some of...

  2. Perl Sucks

    Don't get your panties in a knot... Those aren't my words. Erik is ranting about Perl and I agree on a few points. When I go back to Perl I'm usually like,

  3. It looks like perl and perl5.8.0 are hardlinked together. (see the ln(1) man page) .. note the "2" in the "number of links" column of the ls output. That would give the file copying behavior which you have observed.