Question

I’m a perl noob and I have a very basic question regarding the @INC post: How is Perl's @INC constructed? (aka What are all the ways of affecting where Perl modules are searched for?)

Does the “otherlibdirs” Configure option completely rewrite the directories that are part of @INC, or merely add another directory? It’s not clear to me from that answer what it does, and I don’t want to screw up the whole @INC path.

Thanks!

Answer 1

Perusing source of the Perl Configure script, we find the following usage information:

case "$otherlibdirs" in
''|' ') dflt='none' ;;
*)  dflt="$otherlibdirs" ;;
esac
$cat <<EOM
Enter a colon-separated set of extra paths to include in perl's @INC
search path, or enter 'none' for no extra paths.

EOM

So if you compile Perl with something like

    Configure -Dotherlibdirs=/usr/foo/bar:/usr/foo/bar/baz

Then the directories /usr/foo/bar and /usr/foo/bar/baz will be appended to the normal @INC built-in to the perl binary.