Perl – How to compile a Perl script to a Windows executable with Strawberry Perl

In addition to the three tools listed in the question, there's another one called Cava Packager written by Mark Dootson, who has also contributed to PAR in the past. It only runs under Windows, has a nice Wx GUI and works differently from the typical three contenders in that it assembles all Perl dependencies in a source / lib directory instead of creating a single archive containing everything. There's a free version, but it's not Open Source. I haven't used this except for testing.

As for PAR, it's really a toolkit. It comes with a packaging tool which does the dependency scanning and assembly of stand-alone executables, but it can also be used to generate and use so-called .par files, in analogy to Java's JARs. It also comes with client and server for automatically loading missing packages over the network, etc. The slides of my PAR talk at YAPC::EU 2008 go into more details on this. There's also an active mailing list: par at perl dot org.

Here is how to solve it on Mac OS X v10.7 (Lion) or Cygwin (Windows 10):

Add the following lines to your bashrc or bash_profile file on the host machine:

# Setting for the new UTF-8 terminal support in Lion
export LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8
export LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8

If you are using Z shell (zsh), edit file zshrc:

# Setting for the new UTF-8 terminal support in Lion
LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8
LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8