It's not off-topic - I knew someone here would know a better way. Thanks, blueflashlight. I'm surprised I never came across this info anywhere else.Probably because the mac discussion groups are cluttered with topics in which I have no remote interest.

You're right, it is really a fully-baked unix, and my satisfaction with OS X just increased significantly. Especially after my first install, which was so sluggish I was ready to write off Apple forever....the only thing differently I did was to format the partition as "Unix" (sluggish)instead of "Mac extended" (works fine)....

Now my dilemma is which OS/computer to choose as my primary development machine - the Mac or the Linux...

My apologies to jepri above. I don't work with Perl/Tk normally, so I'll leave it for someone else to test.