Microsoft Windows 2000
Server Administrator's Companion
by Sharon Crawford & Charlie Russel
copyright (c) 2000 by Microsoft Corporation
all rights reserved

Home
Articles
Utilities
Software

Electronic Book

Installing Perl

Microsoft doesn't make a PERL interpreter, so technically any PERL environment is made by another company and is therefore unsupported, so Microsoft can't guarantee that it will work at all.

That being said, here's is how one Microsoft technical support person installed PERL on a Windows 2000 server:

Download ActivePerl from www.activestate.com to your desktop. Run this file to launch the InstallShield wizard for PERL.  As you step through the pages in the wizard accept all defaults, except add PERL for ISAPI to the list of components to install.  (PERL for ISAPI is an IIS plug-in that greatly speeds up Perl CGI scripts.)

The installation program may not register the files with the PERL interpreter properly, so manually register PERL by using the following steps if necessary (this may be fixed in newer versions of ActivePerl):

  1. Open the Internet Services Manager in the MMC
  2. Right-click on your machine and choose properties
  3. Select the WWW service master properties and click edit
  4. Select the home directory tab
  5. Click the configuration button
  6. Click the add button
  7. Click the browse button and locate the X:\PERL\BIN\PERLIS.DLL file, where X: is the drive that you installed PERL to
  8. Enter .pl for the extension
  9. Click OK all the way back to the MMC
  10. Exit the MMC

Next, try out the following PERL test script: 

	print "HTTP/1.0 200 OK\n";
	print "Content-Type: text/html\n\n";
	print "<HTML>\n";
	print "<HEAD>\n";
	print "<TITLE>Hello World</TITLE>\n";
	print "</HEAD>\n";
	print "<BODY>\n";
	print "<H4>Hello World</H4>\n";
	print "<P>\n";
	print "Your IP Address is $ENV{REMOTE_ADDR}.\n";
	print "</BODY>\n";
	print "</HTML>\n";

You can save the above code as HELLO.PL in your SCRIPTS folder and browse it to see a web page returned.  If not, retrace the above steps.