perlbrew PATH in Emacs.app

Emacs.app on Mac is not launched with the same $PATH set from bashrc/cshrc, which means perlbrew cannot work without some special treatments. One common problem is that cperl-perldoc will not be able to find the module document correctly. If you're experiencing it, keep reading.

To get cperl-perldoc working, set the environment variable PATH inside .emacs:

(load "cl-seq")

;;; Prepend perlbrew paths to exec-path
(mapc (lambda (x) (add-to-list 'exec-path x))
 (mapcar (lambda (x) (concat (getenv "HOME") x))
         (list "/perl5/perlbrew/bin" "/perl5/perlbrew/perls/current/bin")))

;;; set PATH to be the same as exec-path, clobber the old PATH value.
(setenv "PATH"
        (reduce
         (lambda (a b) (concatenate 'string a ":" b))
         exec-path))

cperl-perldoc should correctly invoke the perldoc program in PATH from now.

To verify that exec-path setting is also working, try eval (C-x C-e) this sexp in *scratch* buffer:

(call-process "perl" nil t nil "-E" "say $^X")

The full path of current perl executable should be appeared in the *scratch* buffer.