So I did a minimal install of centos 7 vm guest just to find out it did not install perl. Since as of right now I have no properly functioning network on that machine (different issue; we can talk about that in another post), I went for the next best thing: install CD. I grabbed the CentOS-7-x86_64-Everything-1611.iso CD (around 8GB), attached it to the guest, and mounted it on /mnt. Then I edited the cat /etc/yum.repos.d/CentOS-Media.repo # CentOS-Media.repo # # This repo can be used with mounted DVD media, verify the mount point for # CentOS-7. You can use this repo and yum to install items directly off the # DVD ISO that we release. # # To use this repo, put in your DVD and use it with the other repos too: # yum --enablerepo=c7-media [command] # # or for ONLY the media repo, do this: # # yum --disablerepo=\* --enablerepo=c7-media [command] [c7-media] name=CentOS-$releasever - Media baseurl=file:///mnt/ gpgcheck=1 enabled=0 gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-CentOS-7 I then run yum clean all and then decided to look for perl only on the cd repo, i.e. yum --disablerepo=\* --enablerepo=c7-media search perl It gave me back the pcre package, which is already installed. I did check the /mnt.Packages dir and there are plenty of perl-related packages including itself. yum --disablerepo=\* --enablerepo=c7-media list all shows only installed packages, some of which are shown (?) to have been installed from c7-media.