perl breakage

I run a bunch of CentOS 4 boxes at work, and recent yum updates to perl caused me a lot of problems. If I tried doing just about anything in cpan, I'd get errors like this:

Use of uninitialized value in concatenation (.) or string at
/path/to/Scalar/Util.pm line 30.

and this

Undefined subroutine &Compress::Zlib::gzopen ...

After several Web searches, I found a Google Groups posting which recommended manually installing Scalar::List::Utils.

I have no idea what Scalar::List::Utils has to do with anything, but it seemed
to work. Thank you, Peter Scott.

If you try this, and the Compress::Zlib::gzopen errors persist, you could try the following (admittedly drastic) measure. It was successful for me in one case where just installing Scalar::List::Utils wasn't enough (for whatever reason). Try running the following search against your perl libraries (might be in a different directory on a non-RedHat-like distribution):

find /usr/lib/perl5/ -type f -path '*Compress/Zlib.pm'

Delete or rename the Zlib.pm files found, and then try 'install Compress::Zlib' in cpan (you may need to 'force install Compress::Zlib').