G'day Karl,

I read what you've written several times but the point you're trying to make eludes me. I was particularly stumped by your final words: "Very strange...".

The OP shouldn't need to manually source '~/perl5/perlbrew/etc/bashrc' in order to use Perlbrew. Doing this will set up environment variables such as you've shown, but only in the current shell. It's a tedious task that's easy to forget and therefore error-prone: hence my suggestion to set up something similar to my '.bash_profile' and '.bashrc'.

I set all this up for myself years ago and haven't needed to change anything since. While I don't remember specifics, I do recall all instructions came from Perlbrew documentation: I didn't need to seek out secret incantations in dark corners of the Internet.

For what it's worth, except for some obvious and expected differences (e.g. s/karl/ken/), my environment looks very similar to yours.