Welcome twieckow,

On all my AIX systems ( 5.2 to 7.1 ), Perl is very easy to install and would recommend you not use the system Perl except for your Admin work. However, I also recommend you use 'gcc' and not the native 'xlc' compiler, since I found it much easier to get a clean Perl version using 'gcc'.

New versions of Perl are excellent and you can use '/usr/local/bin' to link the version for your users:

   ln -s /usr/opt/perl5.14.4/bin/perl /usr/local/bin/myperl
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Obviously the version of Perl you use and the name you call it is dynamic.

I did use 'perl5.14.4' because it works very well on AIX 6.1. If you don't need 'threads', I would recommend configuring Perl without 'threads'. If you have a need, I usually build 2 versions, one with (myperl-t) and one without(myperl).

On AIX, I see additional overhead with the 'threads' version even if your not using 'threads'.

Good Luck!

Regards...Ed