May 2002
Beginner
704 pages
16h 37m
English
When you've successfully downloaded the Perl source code, extract it from its archive. There are two steps required to extract the Perl archive; decompressing it using gzip, and expanding the archive using tar. To unzip the file, use the following command:
gzip -d latest.tar.gz
Then, untar the file using this command:
tar xvf latest.tar
As the tar program runs, a list of all the files being extracted from the archive will be printed on the screen. Don't worry about the output. A directory named perl5.6.1 or something similar will be created with all the Perl files inside.
Detailed installation instructions can be found in the README and INSTALL files; I'll summarize the process in the following sections.