Running Perl Programs without 'installing' Perl

John M. Dlugosz has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I had a useful program criticised because someone doesn't want to "install" Perl on the target machine.

Hey, if VB wants to drag around a multi-megabyte DLL, why not Perl programs?

Besides making the files available on the file system, what is really necessary to run perl.exe on a Windows system? For a trivial script, it appears that nothing that's in the registry is actually used, and what it is looking for isn't present. So, I think it comes up with the @INC all by itself based on the exe's location. Is that correct, or is there some other hidden configuration somewhere?

Is there anything else I should know about besides (1) seeing the directory tree and (2) making sure @INC points to it?

—John

Comment on Running Perl Programs without 'installing' Perl

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Re: Running Perl Programs without 'installing' Perl by dree (Monsignor) on Oct 28, 2002 at 17:10 UTC
There is a new module that tries to do that: App::Packer from Mattia Barbon the author of wxPerl For me it works for non-GUI scripts and for small Tks. But it is only a 0.04 version so it will grow! If you will distribute perl56.dll like the VB's runtime dll, you will have the same VB's scenario for Perl.	[reply]
Re: Running Perl Programs without 'installing' Perl by fglock (Vicar) on Oct 28, 2002 at 16:51 UTC
That's all you need. I run perl on a share (w:\bin\perl) and it works ok as: `w:\bin\perl my_program.pl options` You might set up an "association" to the ".pl" extension, but only if you want to.	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Running Perl Programs without 'installing' Perl by iburrell (Chaplain) on Oct 28, 2002 at 17:49 UTC
Check out PerlApp from ActiveState, http://www.activestate.com/. It packs the Perl binaries, script source, and all required modules into a single executable. I think there is a Linux version but it is most useful for Windows. Also look at Perl2Exe, http://www.indigostar.com/perl2exe.htm.	[reply]

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