Vicky’s server guides

Have you ever had problem updating perl via yum and yum spitting a conflict error message at you?  I’ve met this problem on few CentOS 5 boxes of mine and thought I share the solution.

I happens on 64bit boxes and the error is for example like this

file /usr/share/man/man1/splain.1.gz from install of perl-5.8.8-32.el5_7.6.x86_64 conflicts with file from package perl-5.8.8-32.el5_6.3.i386
file /usr/share/man/man1/xsubpp.1.gz from install of perl-5.8.8-32.el5_7.6.x86_64 conflicts with file from package perl-5.8.8-32.el5_6.3.i386
file /usr/share/man/man3/CGI.3pm.gz from install of perl-5.8.8-32.el5_7.6.x86_64 conflicts with file from package perl-5.8.8-32.el5_6.3.i386

Obviously it is a problem of having a i386 version along the 64bit. First you need to remove the i386 version and then install perl again. You can do it by executing this command:

yum -y remove perl.i386 && yum -y install perl

It should work and you end up with a correct installation of perl. Until the next update