The revision, version, and subversion of the Perl interpreter, represented as a string composed of characters with those ordinals. Thus in Perl v5.6.0 it equals chr(5) . chr(6) . chr(0)
and will return true for $^V eq v5.6.0
. Note that the characters in this string value can potentially be in Unicode range.
This can be used to determine whether the Perl interpreter executing a script is in the right range of versions. (Mnemonic: use ^V for Version Control.) Example:
warn "No \"our\" declarations!\n" if $^V and $^V lt v5.6.0;
To convert $^V
into its string representation use sprintf()'s "%vd"
conversion:
printf "version is v%vd\n", $^V; # Perl's version
See the documentation of use VERSION
and require VERSION
for a convenient way to fail if the running Perl interpreter is too old.
See also $]
for an older representation of the Perl version.