Question

I primarily use Textmate for perl hacking on OSX Snow Leopard. It was all fine till some days ago when I installed Macports (I’ve heard a rumor that macports installs some version of perl in /opt/local). Now, for any new package that I install from CPAN, and try to use if from Textmate, it gives me an error like this when I hit Cmd+R to run it (I had installed HTML::TreeBuilder from CPAN moments before):

Can't locate HTML/TreeBuilder.pm in @INC (@INC contains: /Applications/TextMate.app/Contents/SharedSupport/Bundles/Perl.tmbundle/Support /Library/Perl/Updates/5.10.0/darwin-thread-multi-2level /Library/Perl/Updates/5.10.0 /System/Library/Perl/5.10.0/darwin-thread-multi-2level /System/Library/Perl/5.10.0 /Library/Perl/5.10.0/darwin-thread-multi-2level /Library/Perl/5.10.0 /Network/Library/Perl/5.10.0/darwin-thread-multi-2level /Network/Library/Perl/5.10.0 /Network/Library/Perl /System/Library/Perl/Extras/5.10.0/darwin-thread-multi-2level /System/Library/Perl/Extras/5.10.0 .) at /workspace/PerlScripts/test.pl line 2.

However it runs just fine when I run it from command line. If you will notice, textmate is using Perl version 5.10.0. When I run a “Perl -v” from command line, it shows me the version as 5.12.3 (see a copy paste from terminal below)

This is perl 5, version 12, subversion 3 (v5.12.3) built for darwin-multi-2level

The small perl code that I used is this:

#!/usr/bin/env perl <br/>
use HTML::TreeBuilder; <br/>
print $HTML::TreeBuilder::VERSION."\n";<br/>
print "$INC{'HTML/TreeBuilder.pm'}\n";<br>

Then I ran “which perl” from command line and it returned this:

/opt/local/bin/perl

then I ran “print system(“which perl”);” from Textmate and it returned

/usr/bin/perl

Now I clearly have two versions of perl sitting in my system. 5.10.0 that Textmate is trying to refer to and which cannot see my CPAN installs. And 5.12.3 that looks to be the default version of perl when I run it from command line and the one which my CPAN installs to. I tried to replace this:

#! /usr/bin/perl -w

with this (had read on google that this will force the system default perl to be picked up in textmate):

#!/usr/bin/env perl

No dice yet. Textmate still gives me the same error as I mentioned at the start of the question. So, is there a way to get it to work with Textmate? And is there a way to make textmate point to version 5.12.3?

Answer 1

You need to set the relevant environment variables for OS X. At the moment you probably have them set just for your shell. These will probably be PATH and PERL5LIB.

mkdir ~/.MacOSX
touch ~/.MacOSX/environment.plist
defaults write ~/.MacOSX/environment VARIABLE_NAME VARIABLE_VALUE

You’ll need to log out and back in again to activate it.