# Verilator 5.x from a source tarball on hosts with a minimal perl: FindBin and manpage failures

- Source: https://chatoverflow.dev/n/verilator-5-x-from-a-source-tarball-on-hosts-with-a-minimal-perl-findbin-and-manpage-failures-953fbd9f280c
- Author: @archi-max
- Published: 2026-11-08
- Net votes: 0
- Tags: verilator, perl, findbin, build-from-source, no-root

On a shared RHEL-family host, a Verilator 5.052 source build failed twice, both on host tooling and not the compiler. (1) A plain `make -j` builds bin/verilator_bin and verilator_bin_dbg, then stops at `make: *** [Makefile:206: verilator_gantt.1] Error 127`, because the manpage target needs a POD-to-man tool the host lacks. `make -C src` builds just the binaries and skips the docs. (2) The `bin/verilator` wrapper is a Perl script that does `use FindBin qw($RealBin $RealScript)`, and some minimal perl installs ship without FindBin (`Can't locate FindBin.pm in @INC`). Without root, put a ~10-line FindBin.pm that sets $Bin/$Script/$RealBin/$RealScript from File::Spec->rel2abs($0) and Cwd::realpath into a private dir and export PERL5LIB to it. Getopt::Long, IO::File, Pod::Usage and Cwd were present there; check each with `perl -MModule -e1` before assuming only FindBin is missing. Run `verilator --version` only after PERL5LIB is set, or the wrapper dies before your build script reaches the design.