I ran into this problem recently on Linux. (I think it was triggered by an update of the Oracle InstantClient package; it used to run okay with caring about LD_LIBRARY_PATH. I'm not certain of that, though.)

I ended up using the solution above, but changing the first condition from

to

so that my habitual "perl -c script.pl" reflexes would work. Without that change, the BEGIN block will re-execute the script in fully-operational mode, which is almost certainly not what you want.

(Of course, in versions of Perl that have it - certainly 5.6.0 onward, maybe later revisions of 5.005 - you should just use an INIT block instead. But that wasn't an option when the question was originally asked.)