As documented in perlrun if the first character of the library name after -M / -m is a dash the use is treated as no instead: perl -M-lib=/TO/REMOVE ...

Thanks! Now that you pointed it out, I vaguely remember reading about this years ago.

I want to set @INC to an exactly list of directories

eh? You've surely done something wrong along the way if you need to do this.

Why do you think you need to remove entries from @INC?

I have a perl script that starts another instance of perl interpreter, and I want the latter to inherit the original script's @INC.

The actual case is I'm testing (prove -l) a script in a Perl distribution which starts another perl script that requires a module in the current distribution. The latter script would fail to find the module because its @INC does not contain lib. Now in this specific case I can just add -Ilib option to the latter script's invocation when detecting some environment variable, but I'm curious about the more generic solution.

Have script #1 add to PERL5LIB whatever it adds to @INC.

BEGIN {
    @INC = YOUR_LIST;
}
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... on top of your script?

update

> from the command-line option

Oops, I missed that, sorry.

printf '
   package cleanlib;
   sub import { @INC = ( ); }
   1
' >cleanlib.pm

perl -Mlib=. -Mcleanlib -Mlib=... ...
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