Perl 5.8.6 on OS X Server 10.3+ (Panther)

Installation of perl requires that you have Mac OS X Developer Tools (Xcode) installed.
(It came with your OSX Server software package.)

perl -v

This will check your current version.

cd /usr/local/
sudo mkdir src
sudo chown root:staff src
sudo chmod 775 src
cd src
curl -O http://cpan.org/src/stable.tar.gz
tar zxvf stable.tar.gz
cd perl-5.8.6

rm -f config.sh Policy.sh

./Configure -de -Dprefix=/usr
make
make test
sudo make install

sudo perl -MCPAN -eshell
cpan> install Bundle::CPAN
cpan> install HTML::Parser