The Standard Distribution
Most operating system vendors these days include Perl as a standard component of their systems. As of this writing, AIX, BeOS, BSDI, Debian, DG/UX, DYNIX/ptx, FreeBSD, IRIX, LynxOS, Mac OS X, OpenBSD, RedHat, SINIX, Slackware, Solaris, SuSE, and Tru64 all came with Perl as part of their standard distributions. Some companies provide Perl on separate CDs of contributed freeware or through their customer service groups. Third-party companies like ActiveState offer prebuilt Perl distributions for a variety of different operating systems, including those from Microsoft.
Even if your vendor does ship Perl as standard, you'll probably
eventually want to compile and install Perl on your own. That way you'll
know you have the latest version, and you'll be able to choose where to
install your libraries and documentation. You'll also be able to choose
whether to compile Perl with support for optional extensions such as
multithreading, large files, or the many low-level debugging options
available through the -D command-line switch.
(The user-level Perl debugger is always supported.)
The easiest way to download a Perl source kit is probably to point your web browser to Perl's home page at http://www.perl.com, where you'll find download information prominently featured on the start-up page, along with links to precompiled binaries for platforms that have misplaced their C compilers.
You can also head directly to CPAN (the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network, described ...