Making Perl Work On Windows

When you search google, perldoc, or activestate for info/help with Perl, you often find information that was written for Unix/Linux users.  And it's not easy — sometimes it's near impossible — to find out how to implement the feature/solution on Windows.  This page is a small collection of some things I've learned along the way.

I will assume that you have ActivePerl installed.  Go get it if you don't.  Once it's installed, you have everything you need to run perl scripts on Windows.  Just write your Perl script into a file like myscript.pl, then go to a command prompt, cd to the folder containing myscript.pl, and type perl myscript.pl. (Click here for my tutorial on how to write Perl scripts.)

But, if you want to install extra perl packages, which you may some day, then read the following section.

To install packages

ActivePerl comes with programs called ppm and ppm3 which are Perl Package Managers.  Type ppm or ppm3 at the command prompt to use them.  They're "interactive" programs that have their own prompts, at which you should type search modulename to find which modules you can install.  This will search the ActiveState website for all modules containing modulename and return a list.  Then type install modulename once you've found the one you want.

To "make" files

If you're installing a package/module without using ppm, then the process typically looks like this:

perl Makefile.PL
make
make test
make install

And if you're using Windows, you don't have a program called make, so the last 3 won't work.  What you need to use is Microsoft's nmake instead of make (or dmake, if you're using Win9x).  It does exactly the same thing, except it does it for Windows instead of Unix/Linux.  Just download it, extract it, and put the files in your Windows or Winnt folder.