One of our customers had two "identical" aix boxes. On one of these, perl 5.8.6 worked fine; on the other (with identical binary perl build) running perl -v hung.
Apparently, google did not help, and they
then spent hours trying to trouble-shoot
this problem, without success.
In desperation, they asked me for advice.
I did a quick google and also came up dry.
I then suggested they run perl -v
via the aix truss command,
which showed perl was hanging on an
open of /dev/urandom.
After fixing the offending /dev/urandom device, all was well.
A happy ending.
The main reason I'm writing
this journal entry is in the hope it will be
indexed by a google robot and so be of use
to someone who suffers this problem in the
future. If perl 5.8 is hanging, run it with
truss (or equivalent tool) to
see where. And be suspicious of /dev/urandom or /dev/random. I guess
this open of /dev/urandom
was added in support of the new hash randomisation
feature of perl 5.8 (designed to thwart denial
of service attacks).
