Perl 5.10 on CentOS 5?
The "Modern" way of setting up a version of Perl different from the system Perl is by using
perlbrew - this way you can maintain a Perl version on a per-user basis without messing too much with the system installed perl; this way system installed stuff that uses Perl still works without problems.
The RPMs at https://packages.endpoint.com/rhel/5/os/ look good. They install perl in /usr/local.
Something like this should work:
wget http://www.cpan.org/src/perl-5.12.3.tar.gz
tar -xzf perl-5.12.3.tar.gz
cd perl-5.12.3
./Configure -des -Dprefix=$HOME/localperl
make
make test
make install
Then you can run the scripts with /usr/bin/perl5.12.3