Solaris, Perl and the “inet_aton” problem

In past week I had to compile a new version of Perl in a Solaris box.

This Solaris machine had a GNU compiler (gcc, make, etc.) and I used them on this task.

Everything went fine on compilation, but when I had to use some modules dependent of socket library I faced with this error:

ld.so.1: perl: fatal: relocation error: \
file /home/xxx/utils/perl/lib/5.12.3/sun4-solaris/auto/Socket/Socket.so: \
symbol inet_aton: referenced symbol not found Killed

Reading some documentation about the inet_aton on Solaris systems I noted the function is not implemented on old versions of Solaris and the inet_pton function is used instead.

To solve this problem I had to change the script Configure and recompile the sources:

from:

d_inetaton='$d_inetaton'

to:

d_inetaton='undef'

Just to inform you, in new versions of Solaris (9 and so) the inet_aton function is implemented on libresolv library.

My 2 cents