I am agree with you all as removing of perl package need extra cautious.
you can check your current release version
cat /etc/redhat-release
this is applicable to either RHEL or CentOS
e.g
CentOS release 5.7 (Final)

In case your repo configuration is nothing wrong. May be earlier time you try to update perl package with rpm command.
like manual install
rpm -U --nodeps perl-xxxxx.x86_86.rpm

That might be the answer. So that your system has two different versions.
Hope above info is helpful for your troubleshooting.

You might also need --force for that to work.

you can download perl-5.8.8-32.el5_7.6.i386.rpm from centos site.

yum update perl-5.8.8-32.el5_7.6.i386.rpm

Hope that will solve your problem

Hi all,

I had the exact same issue.
Solved it by following the above

1. Download the rpm from one of the centos mirrors
2. install it using After this the normal yum update worked.

Thx all

Well thank you all for ur suggestions...

well i have centos 5.7 installed and when i did "rpm -qa perl" it gave the following:

perl-5.8.8-32.el5_6.3

perl-5.8.8-32.el5_6.3


which means 2 packages are already installed and i dnt knw how....it's a 64bit machine and when i do yum check-update it gives following:

perl.x86_64 4:5.8.8-32.el5_7.6 updates

Obsoleting Packages

perl.x86_64 4:5.8.8-32.el5_7.6 updates

perl-Time-HiRes.noarch 1.9707-3 installed

perl.x86_64 4:5.8.8-32.el5_7.6 updates

perl-Storable.noarch 2.16-3 installed

perl.x86_64 4:5.8.8-32.el5_7.6 updates

perl-MIME-Base64.x86_64 3.07-3 installed


And this is confusing me even more and when i do yum update it gives the error which i hv posted earlier..

So Mr. 0X06 will your suggestion solve my problem?or anyone?

Plz dnt mind as it's a live slave nameserver...

Why wouldn't perl be installed?

i told u it gives error that which have mentioned earlier in the post..

and evn if i were to force install perl can anyone tell me which mirror to download?

And I told you how to fix it.

Do a

yum erase perl-5.8.8-32.el5_6.3.i386
and a clean all and an update . It should work fine.....

Hope it helps !!!

Well i checked the mirrorlist for perl and it seem both perl-5.8.8-32.el5_6.3.i386.rpm and perl-5.8.8-32.el5_6.3.x86_64.rpm have been installed in the system which are of different architectures because when i do rpm -qa perl i get :

perl-5.8.8-32.el5_6.3

perl-5.8.8-32.el5_6.3


And now i have update for x86_64 and thats y giving the error..

So Mr. eeekster can i directly do rpm -U --nodeps perl-xxxxx.x86_64.rpm --force or first download the package?

Centos installs i386 along with x86_64 due to compatibility reasons.
If you want to be absolutely sure download both rpms from centos and install both.
I know for sure I won't need i386.

And yes you have to download the packages first

DON'T DO THAT!!!! It's overkill and just a wee bit dangerous. How many packages are going to leave with the yum erase? (You really, really, REALLY don't want to do that!)

All that's needed is what has already been said: update perl package using the rpm command with the --force option. The conflicts don't matter so force rpm to ignore them and move on.

well i didnt find any rpm for perl-5.8.8-32.el5_7.6.x86_64.rpm in any mirror, i found only perl-5.8.8-32.el5_6.3.x86_64.rpm and perl-5.8.8-32.el5_7.6.i386.rpm so it's really confusing...

Whatever. Install them both.

Thank you mr.eekster and thank you everyone..

i got the package for 64bit as well and and did as suggested and now the problem has been solved...it was pending for months...

Thanks a million to all..