Let me say, re-reading this thread after ever so long, that you can both use MD5 and use Perl's crypt() on GNU/Linux and certain other systems without the use of outside modules.

If you hand crypt() on GNU/Linux a bare salt, it's used for DES (or triple DES actually I think in Linux's case). If you hand crypt() a salt of the format $1$salt$ then it does MD5, with up to 8 characters of salt and up to 22 bytes of (encrypted) password.

With Perl's crypt being implemented on Linux as a wrapper around the library call, it behaves the same.

This is at least valid on GNU/Linux. The man page for crypt(3) on a GNU/Linux box I was just on says it's a GNU extension as of glibc2. So I'd imagine that any system using glibc2 (and on which perl is linked against the crypt library, which is a specific requirement according to the man page) should be able to do the same.

Look at crypt(3) with your friendly neighborhood man program or its equivalent on your target system(s) to find out for sure.

Christopher E. Stith