After a recent freebsd update fetch && freebsd update install
Apache would not restart properly. It was complaining about missing perl modules it relied on. So we rebuilt the perl port and all its dependencies.
sudo portmaster -m BATCH=yes --no-confirm -D -r perl
The -m BATCH=yes
chooses defaults at setup screens and bypasses them, --no-confirm
avoids prompting at the command line, -D
keeps distfiles in tact and -r
updates all its port dependencies. Once this was done Apache fired right up!