I have a new computer with Ubuntu 18.10 on it. It comes with perl 5.26, but I wanted to brew my own perl.

Install perlbrew

sudo apt-get install perlbrew

List the available versions of perl:

perlbrew available

Brew (install) perl 5.28.1:

$ perlbrew install perl-5.28.1

The response is

Fetching perl 5.28.1 as /home/gabor/perl5/perlbrew/dists/perl-5.28.1.tar.gz
Download http://www.cpan.org/src/5.0/perl-5.28.1.tar.gz to /home/gabor/perl5/perlbrew/dists/perl-5.28.1.tar.gz
ERROR: Failed to download http://www.cpan.org/src/5.0/perl-5.28.1.tar.gz

Oh. That's not good.

mkdir -p perl5/perlbrew/dists

Now this works:

perlbrew install perl-5.28.1

Using Perlbrew

At this point you should be able to switch to the newly intsalled perl using

perlbrew switch perl-5.28.1

and it works, but it also prints this, and the switch is only temporary. I think this should be a permanent switch. As I recall it used to be a permanent switch.

A sub-shell is launched with perl-5.28.1 as the activated perl. Run 'exit' to finish it.

Anyway, not too optimal workaround is to add this

export PATH=~/perl5/perlbrew/perls/perl-5.28.1/bin:$PATH

to the ~/.bashrc file.