I am building the Perl DBD::Oracle module using InstantClient 10.2.0.4.0 on HPUX 11.11. The build is successful, but the TEST fails with the following error:

t/10general.t ...... DBI connect('','user/pwd@dbname','') failed: ERROR OCIEnvNlsCreate. Check ORACLE_HOME env var, NLS \ settings, permissions, etc. at tmp.pl line 12 Error ERROR OCIEnvNlsCreate. Check ORACLE_HOME env var, NLS settings, \ permissions, etc. at tmp.pl line 12.

The build and the testing is done as the "oracle" unix account which owns the Oracle RDBMS installation, the perl installation (which was built from scratch) and the instantclient installation.

I have confirmed that the ORACLE_HOME points to the instantclient directory and that the basic, sdk and sqlplus zip files have been unpackaged there.

SQLPLUS does connect properly as
sqlplus user/pwd@dbname

Any idea why the BUILD works, but the TEST fails?

Specs:
======
OS: HPUX 11.11
RDBMS (for TNS_ADMIN and ORA_NLS10) setting: 10gR2
InstantClient: 10.2.0.4.0 (for hp-parisc-32, according to READ it is for HPUX 11.11) (unpackaged by same account)
Perl: 5.8.8 (built from source by same account)
DBI: 1.607 (built from source by same account)
DBD-Oracle: 1.22 (built from source by same account)
ORACLE_HOME=(directory where instantclient was unpackaged) (basic, sdk and sqlplus)
SHLIB_PATH=$ORACLE_HOME
TNS_ADMIN=(tnsadmin directory of RDBMS 10gR2)
ORA_NLS10=(RDBMS oracle_home)/nls/data