At IU, which systems have Perl?

At Indiana University, Perl is available on Quarry, the Research Database Complex (RDC), Big Red, and the IU central web servers (Webserve and Mercury). Typically, the version available on these systems is some version of Perl 5. Perl 5 is also available on the Mac OS X computers in the Student Technology Centers (STCs).

On Quarry, the RDC, and Big Red, Perl is in the /usr/bin/perl directory. On the other systems mentioned, it's in the /usr/local/bin/perl directory.

Note: On Mercury, the default Red Hat Enterprise Linux install of Perl at /usr/bin/perl will not be updated or have modules added to it. An up-to-date Perl installation is available at /usr/local/bin/perl.

Typically, this file will refer to Perl 5, though other versions of Perl will often be in the same directory. (Perl 4 is no longer available on Webserve.) To find out if other versions of Perl are available, at the Unix prompt, enter:

If you want to find out if Perl is installed on a Unix system not mentioned above, enter one of the following:

Note: The availability of Perl on a system in no way indicates that it allows CGI or web page access.

To see which Perl modules are available on Webserve or Mercury, see Getting a list of the current Perl modules installed on Webserve. (This page refers to Webserve, but the procedure it describes will also work on Mercury.)

Note: Following a system-wide upgrade in December 2012, Quarry now runs Red Hat Enterprise Linux version 6 (RHEL 6) and uses the Modules package (instead of SoftEnv) for manipulating user environments. For more, see Information about the 2012 upgrade to Quarry at IU. If you encounter any problems or have questions, email the High Performance Systems group.

Note: Big Red is scheduled to be retired from service in June 2013. Indiana University is replacing it with Big Red II, the fastest university-owned supercomputer in the nation, capable of performing one quadrillion floating-point operations per second (1 petaflop). Based on Cray XE/XK technology, Big Red II has 676 XK nodes (each containing one AMD "Interlagos" processor and one NVIDIA "Kepler" GPU) and 344 XE nodes (each containing two AMD "Abu Dhabi" processors). For more, see Big Red II at Indiana University.