The latest version of Perl is 5.8.2 or 5.8.3. You should get that, since the newer versions have all kinds of bugfixes and many more modules come standard now. FreeBSD uses ports for package management, right? Perl is definitely going to be part of the standard package set. I don't know how ports works, I've never touched FreeBSD. http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO...ook/index.html should have instructions.