In OpenSolaris, if you’re installing perl modules via CPAN, you might run into this error:

cc: unrecognized option `-KPIC'
cc: language ildoff not recognized
cc: ReadKey.c: linker input file unused because linking not done

In order to fix that, edit the file /usr/perl5/5.8.4/lib/i86pc-solaris- 64int/Config.pm, and make the following changes to the existing lines for ‘optimize’ and ‘cccldflags’: UPDATE! Thanks to reader Vesta for his tip. The original tip I posted will not fix all the issues, for example Apache2::Util won’t install. This problem occurs because the Sun developers build perl with the cc from SunStudio, but by default, the first ‘cc’ found in a user’s path is a symlink to gcc. All you need to do is to install SunStudio, and prefer it’s cc:

pfexec pkg install ss-dev

Now, edit ~/.profile, and prepend your path with SunStudio’s bin directory, like so:

export PATH=/opt/SunStudioExpress/bin/:/usr/gnu/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/X11/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin

You can log out, reboot, source the new .profile, or export a new PATH variable to make the new settings stick. Now you should be able to install most any Perl module!