There are several ways to have multiple Perl versions on one box, and have them play nicely together:

• perlbrew — installs to $HOME. These commands work for me:
  • cpanm App::perlbrew
  • perlbrew init
  • setup your ~/.bashrc like this
  • perlbrew available --all
  • perlbrew install 5.10.1
  • ls -l $PERLBREW_ROOT/perls/
  • perlbrew use perl-5.10.1
  • which perl
  • disable local::lib, since it's more-or-less incompatible with perlbrew — unset PERL_LOCAL_LIB_ROOT PERL_MB_OPT PERL_MM_OPT PERL5LIB
  • note that while perlbrew available --all ostensibly offers versions as far back as perl5.003_02a, if you try to actually build any Perls before 5.6.0, you will immediately get a build error:
    • "The Errno GCC 5 patch only goes back as far as v5.6."
• plx
• plenv
  • as far as I know, 'plenv' is only available on BackPAN, under two different distributions — plenv and App-plenv
• asdf, which has a Perl plugin. These commands work for me:
  • git clone https://github.com/asdf-vm/asdf.git ~/.asdf --branch v0.10.0
  • setup your ~/.bashrc like this
  • asdf plugin add perl
  • asdf list all perl
  • asdf install perl 5.10.0
  • (unfortunately the earliest version that's available is Perl 5.8.1-RC1)