Perl on Mac OS X

Fucking perl. I had an error “install seems impossible” when attempting to do anything with cpan on OS X.

Okay. So here’s what happened: You need to install make to do anything with perl. You install that from the Mac OS X website, you have to register as a developer which is free.

Now, I had tried to use cpan before installing make. Which meanas that it autoconfigured such that it didn’t know where make was, because make wasn’t installed. Once make was installed (it’s the one gig Xcode file you need to install to get make) because we use text files not a dynamic registry to hold settings, cpan still didn’t know make was installed.

The command in cpan to see if it knows where make is is “o conf”. If there’s a blank line next to make, not a thing knows where it is.

The command to change this is: o conf make “path/to/make”, which on OS X looks like – o conf make “/usr/bin/male”. The quotes are needed.

The error message produced here was the distinctly uninformative “NOT OKAY’ and “install seems impossible”. I feel better knowing these instructions are now online somewhere.