> d) something else..

Being my day by day on windows the only positive fact is that there is no trouble interacting with system Perl. I concord with Fletch: never run with the OS' perl install!

I use Strawberry perl portable editions, always. I have few of them in a dedicated directory:

ls | grep perl5

perl5.12-32bit
perl5.20.64bit
perl5.22.64bit
perl5.24.64bit
perl5.26.64bit
perl5.28-64bit
perl5.28.32bit
perl5.32.64bit
[download]

ls | grep on windows? Yes I use UnxUtils with pleasure since years.

I have a not published yet program (maybe soon..) to choose the Perl incarnation to cast: it is somethign interactive so you can check various perl distros (not all above distros are loaded by my program) for some feature as, for example, Non-Capturing-Regular-Expression-Flag introduced in perl 5.22 should fail in 5.20

general>get perl_distros
perl_distros=[ARRAY with 5 elements]
        perl5.20.64bit
        perl5.22.64bit
        perl5.24.64bit
        perl5.26.64bit
        perl-5.26.64bit-PDL

general>check_perl_distro -e "print  'hello' =~ /(hi|hello)/n"
 | 1
[OK] C:\EX_D\ulisseDUE\perl5.26.64bit\perl\bin\perl.exe
 | Unknown regexp modifier "/n" at -e line 1, at end of line
 | Execution of -e aborted due to compilation errors.
[OK] C:\EX_D\ulisseDUE\perl5.20.64bit\perl\bin\perl.exe
 | 1
[OK] C:\EX_D\ulisseDUE\perl5.22.64bit\perl\bin\perl.exe
 | 1
[OK] C:\EX_D\ulisseDUE\perl5.24.64bit\perl\bin\perl.exe
 | 1
[OK] C:\EX_D\ulisseDUE\perl5.26.64bit\perl\bin\perl.exe
 | 1
[OK] C:\EX_D\ulisseDUE\perl-5.26.64bit-PDL\perl\bin\perl.exe
[download]

L*