Archive for July 4th, 2009
perl Makefile.PL errors with “Unable to find a perl 5″ on cygwin
When trying to build a new module on one of our machines which runs cygwin the basic command perl Makefile.pl failed with the error:
Unable to find a perl 5 (by these names: perl.exe perl.exe perl5.exe perl5.8.0.exe miniperl.exe, in these dirs: /usr/local/bin /usr/bin /bin /usr/X11R6/bin /usr/local/libexec/apache /usr/local/bin /usr/bin /bin /usr/X11R6/bin /cygdrive/c/WINDOWS/system32 /cygdrive/c/WINDOWS /cygdrive/c/WINDOWS/System32/Wbem /cygdrive/c/Program /bin /usr/bin)
After doing some digging this turned out to be a simple permissions issue on the perl.exe although perl scripts would happily run in perl -x /usr/bin/perl.exe was returning false.
The fix was a simple chmod a+x /usr/bin/perl.exe for anyone who comes across this issue.