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Santiago Zarate
Santiago Zarate

Posted on • Originally published at foursixnine.io on

About Perl and mismatched binaries

The horror

You happen to update your system (In my case, I use Tumbleweed or Gentoo) and there’s new version of Perl, at some point there’s the realization that you’re using local::lib, and the pain unfolds: A shell is started, and you find a dreaded:

Cwd.c: loadable library and perl binaries are mismatched (got handshake key 0xdb00080, needed 0xdb80080)
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Which means: that the module (Cwd in this case) is not compatible (Because it’s an XS module) with your current version of perl, installed on your system: Likely it was compiled for a previous version, leadin to those binaries mismatching

Don’t panic!

In the past, I used to reinstall my full local::lib directory, however after hanging out and asking few questions on #toolchain on irc.perl.org, I got to write (or rather hack, an ugly hack) a quick perl script to walk the local::lib packages that were installed already, only looking at the specified directory… it worked well, gave me the list of what I needed so I could reinstall later, however Grinnz pointed me to his perl-migrate-modules script, to which after chatting a bit, he added the from switch, which allows people to reinstall all the modules that were present in an old local::lib directory:

The light

# Migrate modules from an old (inactive) local::lib directory
$ perl-migrate-modules --from ~/perl5-old/lib/perl5 /usr/bin/perl
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Hope you find it useful :)

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