I ♥ perlbrew
I love perlbrew! I like to keep the version of Perl that I normally use as up-to-date as possible, but it's nice to keep other versions around for compatibility. Just now, I needed to know when readline got fixed. With perlbrew, it was faster to check directly than it was to look it up!
$ cat >> VentureBros Hank Dean Brock $ perlbrew switch perl-5.12.1 $ perl -e 'print while readline' VentureBros Hank Dean Brock $ perlbrew switch perl-5.10.1 $ perl -e 'print while readline' VentureBros Hank Dean Brock $ perlbrew switch perl-5.8.9 $ perl -e 'print while readline' VentureBros Modification of a read-only value attempted at -e line 1. $ perl -e 'print while <>' VentureBros Hank Dean Brock
So in 5.10 and up, we can use readline for everything. But if we still care about 5.8, then we still need angle brackets.
I blog about Perl.
It's a bit faster without perlbrew if you give all of your perls unique names, as I show in Effective Perl Programming. You don't have to switch:
Ha ha! Yeah, I guess you're right, that is shorter. I still prefer the perlbrew solution, though, because after a switch I've not only got the right perl, but also the corresponding perldoc and cpanm and ...