How can I use perl 5.12 in 10.10?
When writing your own applications, I recommend installing your own Perl. This was once a major pain, but no more. Nowadays, you can use perlbrew to build Perl for you.
On Ubuntu, I think you'll need the build-essential package first, if you don't already. After that, you can use the instructions on the perlbrew docs linked above to install it (or use cpan App::perlbrew).
Once installed you can run:
perlbrew init
perlbrew install perl-5.12.2
perlbrew switch perl-5.12.2
Once you do that and make sure Perlbrew's bashrc is loaded into your bashrc, you should be ale to run:
perl -v
and see that you're running 5.12.
The official perlbrew website is https://perlbrew.pl and it suggests installing by running
wget --no-check-certificate -O - http://install.perlbrew.pl | bash
Then you will still need to
perlbrew install perl-5.12.2
perlbrew switch perl-5.12.2
of course. Finally if you have multiple cores (and who doesn't these days) you can run
perlbrew install -j N perl-5.12.2
where N is the number of jobs requested, often the number of cores you have plus one. I use -j 5 on my quad-core and -j 3 on my dual-core netbook.
Anyway you can easily download last Perl distribution (5.16 or 5.14) and install it:
1. Install Perl
wget http://search.cpan.org/CPAN/authors/id/R/RJ/RJBS/perl-5.16.0.tar.gz
tar -xzf perl-5.16.0.tar.gz
cd perl-5.16.0
./Configure -des -Dprefix=$HOME/usr/local
make
make test
sudo make install
then add:
export PATH=$HOME/usr/local/bin/:$PATH
as result you will get:
$ perl -v
$ perl 5.16
Old perl version is still locate here: /usr/bin/perl
new Perl version will be there: /usr/local/bin/perl
2. Work with CPAN modules
I suggest you install cpanminus (cpanm) for easy manage CPAN modules for new version of Perl.
wget http://search.cpan.org/CPAN/authors/id/M/MI/MIYAGAWA/App-cpanminus-1.5017.tar.gz
tar -xzf App-cpanminus-1.5017.tar.gz
cd App-cpanminus-1.5017
perl Make.pl
make
make test
sudo make install
After that you can install CPAN modules for your new version of Perl.