Monday, February 8, 2010

Installing a Module in Perl through source

I am very new to perl. No idea how to make things work in perl. I mean resolving errors and that kind of stuff. I can write programs with some google help. Two days back I wanted to generate a malformed UDP packet, a packet with an Invalid UDP length field. This kind of packet was notorious for causing a DOS attack on older Unix systems (dont know whats the current status). Sure it was fun. But yes, I found a useful tip for a perl beginner like me. It happens when your code requires a perl module that is not available in your current perl installation. In such cases you see errors like:

Can't locate Socket6.pm in @INC (@INC contains: /usr/lib/perl5/5.10.0/s390x-linux-thread-multi /usr/lib/perl5/5.10.0 /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.10.0/s390x-linux-thread-multi /us
r/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.10.0 /usr/lib/perl5/vendor_perl/5.10.0/s390x-linux-thread-multi /usr/lib/perl5/vendor_perl/5.10.0 /usr/lib/perl5/vendor_perl .) at /etc/ha.d/resource.d/l
directord line 721.
BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at /etc/ha.d/resource.d/ldirectord line 721.

Obviously it means that my Linux doesnt have the perl module named Socket6.pm. It happends many times that if I google with this error string, I may or may not find a quick solution. The better way is to go to the CPAN search site

http://search.cpan.org/

and search for Socket6.pm

This will give you the package that has Socket6.pm in it. Again there can be two ways of installing it, either you install it through CPAN or install it by source. I preferred the second method as my linux machine had some internet connectivity issues.

So download the tar.gz package from the results returned by search.cpan, extract it and install it using the commands

tar -xvzf package.tar.gz
perl Makefile.pl
make
make test
make install

3 comments:

  1. You could also use the CPAN shell, which is less painful.

    perl -MCPAN -e shell

    then

    cpan> install Socket6

    See the CPAN.pm manpage for details.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thank you (Marcel GrĂ¼nauer) - got me right out of a jam

      Delete
  2. Thanks Marcel for the info. CPAN shell should ease many of the lengthy tasks.

    ReplyDelete