How to Install Perl on Windows 7

Perl isn't installed by default on Windows 7 so you'll have to install it before you can run any Perl programs or scripts. It only takes a few minutes to install and it's actually pretty easy to do. After Perl is installed you can begin writing your own Perl programs, or running Perl scripts downloaded from the internet.

The first step in installing Perl is to download the installation package from ActiveState's website.

ActivePerl is available in both 32-bit and 64-bit versions. If you have a 32-bit processor download the x86 version, otherwise download the x64 installation package.

After the download is complete double click on the installer to start the installation wizard.

1. Click next on the first screen of the wizard.
2. Accept the license agreement and then click next again.
3. Click next on the custom setup page unless you want to prevent specific components from being installed.
4. Click next on the custom setup options screen, leave both of the default options enabled.
5. Click the install button to kick off the installation process.

The installation process can take a few minutes to complete depending on how fast your computer is.

Grab a something to drink or check out a book on Perl while you wait.

The Perl Black Book is a great reference book for Perl beginners or veterans. O'Reilly has some great books on Perl as well.

The Perl installer will add the Perl directory to the system path unless you deselected that option during the installation. The problem with adding entries to the system path is that they require a reboot to take affect.

If you don't want to reboot your system you can use a little trick to get around this problem. By adding Perl to the user path the change will take affect immediately without the need for a reboot.

1. Open up the control panel and double click on 'System', or right click on 'Computer' and select properties.
2. Click on 'Advanced system settings' to open the system properties menu.
3. Click the environmental variables button.
4. Select 'PATH' in the user variables section and click on edit.
5. Add a semicolon to the end of the current path and then add C:\Perl64\bin. If you've installed the 32-bit version the path will be C:\Perl\bin.

To test your Perl installation open up a command prompt and type 'perl -v', this should display the version output from perl.

If you don't see the output below then Perl probably isn't in your path, you can either add it manually or reboot your system then try again.

If you see the output of the Perl version information then Perl is successfully installed!