Editing Portal:Linux (section)

=== Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Rocky Linux, AlmaLinux, and CentOS Stream ===

The Red Hat Enterprise Linux family has moved further away from the old assumption that Perl is always installed. RHEL still packages and supports Perl, but modern RHEL minimal environments may not include it by default.

Red Hat’s RHEL 9 packaging documentation states that since RHEL 8, Perl is not included in the default buildroot. Therefore, RPM packages that include Perl scripts must explicitly declare a Perl build dependency through `BuildRequires`.<ref>Red Hat, “Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9: Packaging and distributing software,” section 6.8, https://docs.redhat.com/es/documentation/red_hat_enterprise_linux/9/pdf/packaging_and_distributing_software/red_hat_enterprise_linux-9-packaging_and_distributing_software-en-us.pdf, accessed July 3, 2026.</ref>

This is one of the most important modern Linux Perl changes. It shows that enterprise Linux is no longer assuming Perl as part of the minimal development environment. If a package uses Perl, it must say so.

Rocky Linux, AlmaLinux, Oracle Linux, and CentOS Stream generally inherit the RHEL packaging model. Perl is available through `dnf`, and many Perl modules are available through distribution repositories or EPEL, but a minimal enterprise Linux install should not be assumed to have `/usr/bin/perl`.

This affects portability. A Perl script that runs on Debian by default may fail on a new minimal RHEL-family server until Perl is installed:

<pre>
dnf install perl-interpreter
</pre>

or, for a fuller environment:

<pre>
dnf install perl-core
</pre>

This does not mean Red Hat systems are anti-Perl. It means they have made Perl explicit rather than implicit.