How can I completely uninstall perlbrew?

Question

I'm lovin' it, but I suspect it causes some problem. I know I can use perlbrew off but I would like to completely remove it. How do I do that?

Tamworth

Answer 1

Perl doesn't have an uninstaller, unfortunately, so the general answer is that you have to find the files and remove them. But, what do you want to remove? Just the scripts and modules, or everything that it installed? Find your perlbrew locations with:

perldoc -l perlbrew
perldoc -l App::perlbrew

If you want to uninstall everything that in installed, you have to remove perlbrew's $ROOT directory, which is ~/perl5/perlbrew unless you changed something.

Additionally, if you modified your shell config files to load the perlbrew config files, you have to remove the perlbrew droppings there.

Perlbrew is really a slick interface to a simple task. It installs a bunch of perls and moves around symlinks to them. I do something similar without the symbolic links. See my Make links to per-version tools. post on The Effective Perler.

I should note that I don't really have anything against perlbrew, but I think its a tool for people who already know what they are doing and know what perlbrew is merely automating for them. I don't think it should be a crutch for people who want to not learn the very easy steps to installing a perl.

Blether

I want to remove perlbrew itself and everything that it's installed. Perhaps simply removing my ~/perl5? – Tamworth

How do I remove installed Perl modules? is a CPAN FAQ – Godroon

The CPAN FAQ way is a bit of a pain. It doesn't save you any work in this case. – Blether

@David B: Yes removing ~/perl5 gets rid of everything perlbrew installed for you. If you then remove the "perlbrew droppings" (should be a line like source /home/username/perl5/perlbrew/etc/bashrc in your .bash_profile (if you're using bash? otherwise appropriate profile file) then you have everything back to working order pre perlbrew when you re-login. – Concession

Well, removing ~/perl5 will do that, but it might get rid of a lot of stuff that had nothing to do with perlbrew. – Blether

re: brian's answer - Removing ~/perl5/perlbrew/ is the safer option. – Concession

I used perlbrew for a long time but I have decided to switch to homebrew + plenv, just like rbenv, pyenv. If you also have a Mac, try plenv – Vergne