3 perldiag - various Perl diagnostics
7 These messages are classified as follows (listed in increasing order of
10 (W) A warning (optional).
11 (D) A deprecation (optional).
12 (S) A severe warning (default).
13 (F) A fatal error (trappable).
14 (P) An internal error you should never see (trappable).
15 (X) A very fatal error (nontrappable).
16 (A) An alien error message (not generated by Perl).
18 The majority of messages from the first three classifications above
19 (W, D & S) can be controlled using the C<warnings> pragma.
21 If a message can be controlled by the C<warnings> pragma, its warning
22 category is included with the classification letter in the description
25 Optional warnings are enabled by using the C<warnings> pragma or the B<-w>
26 and B<-W> switches. Warnings may be captured by setting C<$SIG{__WARN__}>
27 to a reference to a routine that will be called on each warning instead
28 of printing it. See L<perlvar>.
30 Default warnings are always enabled unless they are explicitly disabled
31 with the C<warnings> pragma or the B<-X> switch.
33 Trappable errors may be trapped using the eval operator. See
34 L<perlfunc/eval>. In almost all cases, warnings may be selectively
35 disabled or promoted to fatal errors using the C<warnings> pragma.
38 The messages are in alphabetical order, without regard to upper or
39 lower-case. Some of these messages are generic. Spots that vary are
40 denoted with a %s or other printf-style escape. These escapes are
41 ignored by the alphabetical order, as are all characters other than
42 letters. To look up your message, just ignore anything that is not a
47 =item A thread exited while %d other threads were still running
49 (W) When using threaded Perl, a thread (not necessarily the main
50 thread) exited while there were still other threads running.
51 Usually it's a good idea to first collect the return values of the
52 created threads by joining them, and only then exit from the main
53 thread. See L<threads>.
55 =item accept() on closed socket %s
57 (W closed) You tried to do an accept on a closed socket. Did you forget
58 to check the return value of your socket() call? See
61 =item Allocation too large: %lx
63 (X) You can't allocate more than 64K on an MS-DOS machine.
65 =item '!' allowed only after types %s
67 (F) The '!' is allowed in pack() and unpack() only after certain types.
70 =item Ambiguous call resolved as CORE::%s(), qualify as such or use &
72 (W ambiguous) A subroutine you have declared has the same name as a Perl
73 keyword, and you have used the name without qualification for calling
74 one or the other. Perl decided to call the builtin because the
75 subroutine is not imported.
77 To force interpretation as a subroutine call, either put an ampersand
78 before the subroutine name, or qualify the name with its package.
79 Alternatively, you can import the subroutine (or pretend that it's
80 imported with the C<use subs> pragma).
82 To silently interpret it as the Perl operator, use the C<CORE::> prefix
83 on the operator (e.g. C<CORE::log($x)>) or declare the subroutine
84 to be an object method (see L<perlsub/"Subroutine Attributes"> or
87 =item Ambiguous range in transliteration operator
89 (F) You wrote something like C<tr/a-z-0//> which doesn't mean anything at
90 all. To include a C<-> character in a transliteration, put it either
91 first or last. (In the past, C<tr/a-z-0//> was synonymous with
92 C<tr/a-y//>, which was probably not what you would have expected.)
94 =item Ambiguous use of %s resolved as %s
96 (W ambiguous)(S) You said something that may not be interpreted the way
97 you thought. Normally it's pretty easy to disambiguate it by supplying
98 a missing quote, operator, parenthesis pair or declaration.
100 =item '|' and '<' may not both be specified on command line
102 (F) An error peculiar to VMS. Perl does its own command line
103 redirection, and found that STDIN was a pipe, and that you also tried to
104 redirect STDIN using '<'. Only one STDIN stream to a customer, please.
106 =item '|' and '>' may not both be specified on command line
108 (F) An error peculiar to VMS. Perl does its own command line
109 redirection, and thinks you tried to redirect stdout both to a file and
110 into a pipe to another command. You need to choose one or the other,
111 though nothing's stopping you from piping into a program or Perl script
112 which 'splits' output into two streams, such as
114 open(OUT,">$ARGV[0]") or die "Can't write to $ARGV[0]: $!";
121 =item Applying %s to %s will act on scalar(%s)
123 (W misc) The pattern match (C<//>), substitution (C<s///>), and
124 transliteration (C<tr///>) operators work on scalar values. If you apply
125 one of them to an array or a hash, it will convert the array or hash to
126 a scalar value -- the length of an array, or the population info of a
127 hash -- and then work on that scalar value. This is probably not what
128 you meant to do. See L<perlfunc/grep> and L<perlfunc/map> for
131 =item Args must match #! line
133 (F) The setuid emulator requires that the arguments Perl was invoked
134 with match the arguments specified on the #! line. Since some systems
135 impose a one-argument limit on the #! line, try combining switches;
136 for example, turn C<-w -U> into C<-wU>.
138 =item Arg too short for msgsnd
140 (F) msgsnd() requires a string at least as long as sizeof(long).
142 =item %s argument is not a HASH or ARRAY element
144 (F) The argument to exists() must be a hash or array element, such as:
149 =item %s argument is not a HASH or ARRAY element or slice
151 (F) The argument to delete() must be either a hash or array element,
157 or a hash or array slice, such as:
159 @foo[$bar, $baz, $xyzzy]
160 @{$ref->[12]}{"susie", "queue"}
162 =item %s argument is not a subroutine name
164 (F) The argument to exists() for C<exists &sub> must be a subroutine
165 name, and not a subroutine call. C<exists &sub()> will generate this
168 =item Argument "%s" isn't numeric%s
170 (W numeric) The indicated string was fed as an argument to an operator
171 that expected a numeric value instead. If you're fortunate the message
172 will identify which operator was so unfortunate.
174 =item Array @%s missing the @ in argument %d of %s()
176 (D deprecated) Really old Perl let you omit the @ on array names in some
177 spots. This is now heavily deprecated.
179 =item assertion botched: %s
181 (P) The malloc package that comes with Perl had an internal failure.
183 =item Assertion failed: file "%s"
185 (P) A general assertion failed. The file in question must be examined.
187 =item Assignment to both a list and a scalar
189 (F) If you assign to a conditional operator, the 2nd and 3rd arguments
190 must either both be scalars or both be lists. Otherwise Perl won't
191 know which context to supply to the right side.
193 =item Attempt to access disallowed key '%s' in a restricted hash
195 (F) The failing code has attempted to get or set a key which is not in
196 the current set of allowed keys of a restricted hash.
198 =item Attempt to clear a restricted hash
200 (F) It is currently not allowed to clear a restricted hash, even if the
201 new hash would contain the same keys as before. This may change in
204 =item Attempt to delete readonly key '%s' from a restricted hash
206 (F) The failing code attempted to delete a key whose value has been
207 declared readonly from a restricted hash.
209 =item Attempt to delete disallowed key '%s' from a restricted hash
211 (F) The failing code attempted to delete from a restricted hash a key
212 which is not in its key set.
214 =item Attempt to bless into a reference
216 (F) The CLASSNAME argument to the bless() operator is expected to be
217 the name of the package to bless the resulting object into. You've
218 supplied instead a reference to something: perhaps you wrote
224 bless $self, ref($proto) || $proto;
226 If you actually want to bless into the stringified version
227 of the reference supplied, you need to stringify it yourself, for
230 bless $self, "$proto";
232 =item Attempt to free non-arena SV: 0x%lx
234 (P internal) All SV objects are supposed to be allocated from arenas
235 that will be garbage collected on exit. An SV was discovered to be
236 outside any of those arenas.
238 =item Attempt to free nonexistent shared string
240 (P internal) Perl maintains a reference counted internal table of
241 strings to optimize the storage and access of hash keys and other
242 strings. This indicates someone tried to decrement the reference count
243 of a string that can no longer be found in the table.
245 =item Attempt to free temp prematurely
247 (W debugging) Mortalized values are supposed to be freed by the
248 free_tmps() routine. This indicates that something else is freeing the
249 SV before the free_tmps() routine gets a chance, which means that the
250 free_tmps() routine will be freeing an unreferenced scalar when it does
253 =item Attempt to free unreferenced glob pointers
255 (P internal) The reference counts got screwed up on symbol aliases.
257 =item Attempt to free unreferenced scalar
259 (W internal) Perl went to decrement the reference count of a scalar to
260 see if it would go to 0, and discovered that it had already gone to 0
261 earlier, and should have been freed, and in fact, probably was freed.
262 This could indicate that SvREFCNT_dec() was called too many times, or
263 that SvREFCNT_inc() was called too few times, or that the SV was
264 mortalized when it shouldn't have been, or that memory has been
267 =item Attempt to join self
269 (F) You tried to join a thread from within itself, which is an
270 impossible task. You may be joining the wrong thread, or you may need
271 to move the join() to some other thread.
273 =item Attempt to pack pointer to temporary value
275 (W pack) You tried to pass a temporary value (like the result of a
276 function, or a computed expression) to the "p" pack() template. This
277 means the result contains a pointer to a location that could become
278 invalid anytime, even before the end of the current statement. Use
279 literals or global values as arguments to the "p" pack() template to
282 =item Attempt to use reference as lvalue in substr
284 (W substr) You supplied a reference as the first argument to substr()
285 used as an lvalue, which is pretty strange. Perhaps you forgot to
286 dereference it first. See L<perlfunc/substr>.
288 =item Bad arg length for %s, is %d, should be %s
290 (F) You passed a buffer of the wrong size to one of msgctl(), semctl()
291 or shmctl(). In C parlance, the correct sizes are, respectively,
292 S<sizeof(struct msqid_ds *)>, S<sizeof(struct semid_ds *)>, and
293 S<sizeof(struct shmid_ds *)>.
295 =item Bad evalled substitution pattern
297 (F) You've used the C</e> switch to evaluate the replacement for a
298 substitution, but perl found a syntax error in the code to evaluate,
299 most likely an unexpected right brace '}'.
301 =item Bad filehandle: %s
303 (F) A symbol was passed to something wanting a filehandle, but the
304 symbol has no filehandle associated with it. Perhaps you didn't do an
305 open(), or did it in another package.
307 =item Bad free() ignored
309 (S malloc) An internal routine called free() on something that had never
310 been malloc()ed in the first place. Mandatory, but can be disabled by
311 setting environment variable C<PERL_BADFREE> to 0.
313 This message can be seen quite often with DB_File on systems with "hard"
314 dynamic linking, like C<AIX> and C<OS/2>. It is a bug of C<Berkeley DB>
315 which is left unnoticed if C<DB> uses I<forgiving> system malloc().
319 (P) One of the internal hash routines was passed a null HV pointer.
321 =item Bad index while coercing array into hash
323 (F) The index looked up in the hash found as the 0'th element of a
324 pseudo-hash is not legal. Index values must be at 1 or greater.
327 =item Badly placed ()'s
329 (A) You've accidentally run your script through B<csh> instead
330 of Perl. Check the #! line, or manually feed your script into
333 =item Bad name after %s::
335 (F) You started to name a symbol by using a package prefix, and then
336 didn't finish the symbol. In particular, you can't interpolate outside
345 $sym = "mypack::$var";
347 =item Bad realloc() ignored
349 (S malloc) An internal routine called realloc() on something that had
350 never been malloc()ed in the first place. Mandatory, but can be disabled
351 by setting environment variable C<PERL_BADFREE> to 1.
353 =item Bad symbol for array
355 (P) An internal request asked to add an array entry to something that
356 wasn't a symbol table entry.
358 =item Bad symbol for filehandle
360 (P) An internal request asked to add a filehandle entry to something
361 that wasn't a symbol table entry.
363 =item Bad symbol for hash
365 (P) An internal request asked to add a hash entry to something that
366 wasn't a symbol table entry.
368 =item Bareword found in conditional
370 (W bareword) The compiler found a bareword where it expected a
371 conditional, which often indicates that an || or && was parsed as part
372 of the last argument of the previous construct, for example:
376 It may also indicate a misspelled constant that has been interpreted as
379 use constant TYPO => 1;
380 if (TYOP) { print "foo" }
382 The C<strict> pragma is useful in avoiding such errors.
384 =item Bareword "%s" not allowed while "strict subs" in use
386 (F) With "strict subs" in use, a bareword is only allowed as a
387 subroutine identifier, in curly brackets or to the left of the "=>"
388 symbol. Perhaps you need to predeclare a subroutine?
390 =item Bareword "%s" refers to nonexistent package
392 (W bareword) You used a qualified bareword of the form C<Foo::>, but the
393 compiler saw no other uses of that namespace before that point. Perhaps
394 you need to predeclare a package?
396 =item BEGIN failed--compilation aborted
398 (F) An untrapped exception was raised while executing a BEGIN
399 subroutine. Compilation stops immediately and the interpreter is
402 =item BEGIN not safe after errors--compilation aborted
404 (F) Perl found a C<BEGIN {}> subroutine (or a C<use> directive, which
405 implies a C<BEGIN {}>) after one or more compilation errors had already
406 occurred. Since the intended environment for the C<BEGIN {}> could not
407 be guaranteed (due to the errors), and since subsequent code likely
408 depends on its correct operation, Perl just gave up.
410 =item \1 better written as $1
412 (W syntax) Outside of patterns, backreferences live on as variables.
413 The use of backslashes is grandfathered on the right-hand side of a
414 substitution, but stylistically it's better to use the variable form
415 because other Perl programmers will expect it, and it works better if
416 there are more than 9 backreferences.
418 =item Binary number > 0b11111111111111111111111111111111 non-portable
420 (W portable) The binary number you specified is larger than 2**32-1
421 (4294967295) and therefore non-portable between systems. See
422 L<perlport> for more on portability concerns.
424 =item bind() on closed socket %s
426 (W closed) You tried to do a bind on a closed socket. Did you forget to
427 check the return value of your socket() call? See L<perlfunc/bind>.
429 =item binmode() on closed filehandle %s
431 (W unopened) You tried binmode() on a filehandle that was never opened.
432 Check you control flow and number of arguments.
434 =item Bit vector size > 32 non-portable
436 (W portable) Using bit vector sizes larger than 32 is non-portable.
438 =item Bizarre copy of %s in %s
440 (P) Perl detected an attempt to copy an internal value that is not
443 =item B<-P> not allowed for setuid/setgid script
445 (F) The script would have to be opened by the C preprocessor by name,
446 which provides a race condition that breaks security.
448 =item Buffer overflow in prime_env_iter: %s
450 (W internal) A warning peculiar to VMS. While Perl was preparing to
451 iterate over %ENV, it encountered a logical name or symbol definition
452 which was too long, so it was truncated to the string shown.
454 =item Callback called exit
456 (F) A subroutine invoked from an external package via call_sv()
457 exited by calling exit.
459 =item %s() called too early to check prototype
461 (W prototype) You've called a function that has a prototype before the
462 parser saw a definition or declaration for it, and Perl could not check
463 that the call conforms to the prototype. You need to either add an
464 early prototype declaration for the subroutine in question, or move the
465 subroutine definition ahead of the call to get proper prototype
466 checking. Alternatively, if you are certain that you're calling the
467 function correctly, you may put an ampersand before the name to avoid
468 the warning. See L<perlsub>.
470 =item / cannot take a count
472 (F) You had an unpack template indicating a counted-length string, but
473 you have also specified an explicit size for the string. See
476 =item Can't bless non-reference value
478 (F) Only hard references may be blessed. This is how Perl "enforces"
479 encapsulation of objects. See L<perlobj>.
481 =item Can't call method "%s" in empty package "%s"
483 (F) You called a method correctly, and it correctly indicated a package
484 functioning as a class, but that package doesn't have ANYTHING defined
485 in it, let alone methods. See L<perlobj>.
487 =item Can't call method "%s" on an undefined value
489 (F) You used the syntax of a method call, but the slot filled by the
490 object reference or package name contains an undefined value. Something
491 like this will reproduce the error:
494 process $BADREF 1,2,3;
495 $BADREF->process(1,2,3);
497 =item Can't call method "%s" on unblessed reference
499 (F) A method call must know in what package it's supposed to run. It
500 ordinarily finds this out from the object reference you supply, but you
501 didn't supply an object reference in this case. A reference isn't an
502 object reference until it has been blessed. See L<perlobj>.
504 =item Can't call method "%s" without a package or object reference
506 (F) You used the syntax of a method call, but the slot filled by the
507 object reference or package name contains an expression that returns a
508 defined value which is neither an object reference nor a package name.
509 Something like this will reproduce the error:
512 process $BADREF 1,2,3;
513 $BADREF->process(1,2,3);
515 =item Can't chdir to %s
517 (F) You called C<perl -x/foo/bar>, but C</foo/bar> is not a directory
518 that you can chdir to, possibly because it doesn't exist.
520 =item Can't check filesystem of script "%s" for nosuid
522 (P) For some reason you can't check the filesystem of the script for
525 =item Can't coerce array into hash
527 (F) You used an array where a hash was expected, but the array has no
528 information on how to map from keys to array indices. You can do that
529 only with arrays that have a hash reference at index 0.
531 =item Can't coerce %s to integer in %s
533 (F) Certain types of SVs, in particular real symbol table entries
534 (typeglobs), can't be forced to stop being what they are. So you can't
544 but then $foo no longer contains a glob.
546 =item Can't coerce %s to number in %s
548 (F) Certain types of SVs, in particular real symbol table entries
549 (typeglobs), can't be forced to stop being what they are.
551 =item Can't coerce %s to string in %s
553 (F) Certain types of SVs, in particular real symbol table entries
554 (typeglobs), can't be forced to stop being what they are.
556 =item Can't create pipe mailbox
558 (P) An error peculiar to VMS. The process is suffering from exhausted
559 quotas or other plumbing problems.
561 =item Can't declare class for non-scalar %s in "%s"
563 (F) Currently, only scalar variables can be declared with a specific
564 class qualifier in a "my" or "our" declaration. The semantics may be
565 extended for other types of variables in future.
567 =item Can't declare %s in "%s"
569 (F) Only scalar, array, and hash variables may be declared as "my" or
570 "our" variables. They must have ordinary identifiers as names.
572 =item Can't do inplace edit: %s is not a regular file
574 (S inplace) You tried to use the B<-i> switch on a special file, such as
575 a file in /dev, or a FIFO. The file was ignored.
577 =item Can't do inplace edit on %s: %s
579 (S inplace) The creation of the new file failed for the indicated
582 =item Can't do inplace edit without backup
584 (F) You're on a system such as MS-DOS that gets confused if you try
585 reading from a deleted (but still opened) file. You have to say
586 C<-i.bak>, or some such.
588 =item Can't do inplace edit: %s would not be unique
590 (S inplace) Your filesystem does not support filenames longer than 14
591 characters and Perl was unable to create a unique filename during
592 inplace editing with the B<-i> switch. The file was ignored.
594 =item Can't do {n,m} with n > m in regex; marked by <-- HERE in m/%s/
596 (F) Minima must be less than or equal to maxima. If you really want your
597 regexp to match something 0 times, just put {0}. The <-- HERE shows in the
598 regular expression about where the problem was discovered. See L<perlre>.
600 =item Can't do setegid!
602 (P) The setegid() call failed for some reason in the setuid emulator of
605 =item Can't do seteuid!
607 (P) The setuid emulator of suidperl failed for some reason.
609 =item Can't do setuid
611 (F) This typically means that ordinary perl tried to exec suidperl to do
612 setuid emulation, but couldn't exec it. It looks for a name of the form
613 sperl5.000 in the same directory that the perl executable resides under
614 the name perl5.000, typically /usr/local/bin on Unix machines. If the
615 file is there, check the execute permissions. If it isn't, ask your
616 sysadmin why he and/or she removed it.
618 =item Can't do waitpid with flags
620 (F) This machine doesn't have either waitpid() or wait4(), so only
621 waitpid() without flags is emulated.
623 =item Can't emulate -%s on #! line
625 (F) The #! line specifies a switch that doesn't make sense at this
626 point. For example, it'd be kind of silly to put a B<-x> on the #!
629 =item Can't exec "%s": %s
631 (W exec) A system(), exec(), or piped open call could not execute the
632 named program for the indicated reason. Typical reasons include: the
633 permissions were wrong on the file, the file wasn't found in
634 C<$ENV{PATH}>, the executable in question was compiled for another
635 architecture, or the #! line in a script points to an interpreter that
636 can't be run for similar reasons. (Or maybe your system doesn't support
641 (F) Perl was trying to execute the indicated program for you because
642 that's what the #! line said. If that's not what you wanted, you may
643 need to mention "perl" on the #! line somewhere.
645 =item Can't execute %s
647 (F) You used the B<-S> switch, but the copies of the script to execute
648 found in the PATH did not have correct permissions.
650 =item Can't find an opnumber for "%s"
652 (F) A string of a form C<CORE::word> was given to prototype(), but there
653 is no builtin with the name C<word>.
655 =item Can't find %s character property "%s"
657 (F) You used C<\p{}> or C<\P{}> but the character property by that name
658 could not be found. Maybe you misspelled the name of the property
659 (remember that the names of character properties consist only of
660 alphanumeric characters), or maybe you forgot the C<Is> or C<In> prefix?
662 =item Can't find label %s
664 (F) You said to goto a label that isn't mentioned anywhere that it's
665 possible for us to go to. See L<perlfunc/goto>.
667 =item Can't find %s on PATH
669 (F) You used the B<-S> switch, but the script to execute could not be
672 =item Can't find %s on PATH, '.' not in PATH
674 (F) You used the B<-S> switch, but the script to execute could not be
675 found in the PATH, or at least not with the correct permissions. The
676 script exists in the current directory, but PATH prohibits running it.
678 =item Can't find string terminator %s anywhere before EOF
680 (F) Perl strings can stretch over multiple lines. This message means
681 that the closing delimiter was omitted. Because bracketed quotes count
682 nesting levels, the following is missing its final parenthesis:
684 print q(The character '(' starts a side comment.);
686 If you're getting this error from a here-document, you may have included
687 unseen whitespace before or after your closing tag. A good programmer's
688 editor will have a way to help you find these characters.
690 =item Can't find %s property definition %s
692 (F) You may have tried to use C<\p> which means a Unicode property (for
693 example C<\p{Lu}> is all uppercase letters). If you did mean to use a
694 Unicode property, see L<perlunicode> for the list of known properties.
695 If you didn't mean to use a Unicode property, escape the C<\p>, either
696 by C<\\p> (just the C<\p>) or by C<\Q\p> (the rest of the string, until
701 (F) A fatal error occurred while trying to fork while opening a
704 =item Can't get filespec - stale stat buffer?
706 (S) A warning peculiar to VMS. This arises because of the difference
707 between access checks under VMS and under the Unix model Perl assumes.
708 Under VMS, access checks are done by filename, rather than by bits in
709 the stat buffer, so that ACLs and other protections can be taken into
710 account. Unfortunately, Perl assumes that the stat buffer contains all
711 the necessary information, and passes it, instead of the filespec, to
712 the access checking routine. It will try to retrieve the filespec using
713 the device name and FID present in the stat buffer, but this works only
714 if you haven't made a subsequent call to the CRTL stat() routine,
715 because the device name is overwritten with each call. If this warning
716 appears, the name lookup failed, and the access checking routine gave up
717 and returned FALSE, just to be conservative. (Note: The access checking
718 routine knows about the Perl C<stat> operator and file tests, so you
719 shouldn't ever see this warning in response to a Perl command; it arises
720 only if some internal code takes stat buffers lightly.)
722 =item Can't get pipe mailbox device name
724 (P) An error peculiar to VMS. After creating a mailbox to act as a
725 pipe, Perl can't retrieve its name for later use.
727 =item Can't get SYSGEN parameter value for MAXBUF
729 (P) An error peculiar to VMS. Perl asked $GETSYI how big you want your
730 mailbox buffers to be, and didn't get an answer.
732 =item Can't "goto" into the middle of a foreach loop
734 (F) A "goto" statement was executed to jump into the middle of a foreach
735 loop. You can't get there from here. See L<perlfunc/goto>.
737 =item Can't "goto" out of a pseudo block
739 (F) A "goto" statement was executed to jump out of what might look like
740 a block, except that it isn't a proper block. This usually occurs if
741 you tried to jump out of a sort() block or subroutine, which is a no-no.
742 See L<perlfunc/goto>.
744 =item Can't goto subroutine from an eval-string
746 (F) The "goto subroutine" call can't be used to jump out of an eval
747 "string". (You can use it to jump out of an eval {BLOCK}, but you
748 probably don't want to.)
750 =item Can't goto subroutine outside a subroutine
752 (F) The deeply magical "goto subroutine" call can only replace one
753 subroutine call for another. It can't manufacture one out of whole
754 cloth. In general you should be calling it out of only an AUTOLOAD
755 routine anyway. See L<perlfunc/goto>.
757 =item Can't ignore signal CHLD, forcing to default
759 (W signal) Perl has detected that it is being run with the SIGCHLD
760 signal (sometimes known as SIGCLD) disabled. Since disabling this
761 signal will interfere with proper determination of exit status of child
762 processes, Perl has reset the signal to its default value. This
763 situation typically indicates that the parent program under which Perl
764 may be running (e.g. cron) is being very careless.
766 =item Can't "last" outside a loop block
768 (F) A "last" statement was executed to break out of the current block,
769 except that there's this itty bitty problem called there isn't a current
770 block. Note that an "if" or "else" block doesn't count as a "loopish"
771 block, as doesn't a block given to sort(), map() or grep(). You can
772 usually double the curlies to get the same effect though, because the
773 inner curlies will be considered a block that loops once. See
776 =item Can't localize lexical variable %s
778 (F) You used local on a variable name that was previously declared as a
779 lexical variable using "my". This is not allowed. If you want to
780 localize a package variable of the same name, qualify it with the
783 =item Can't localize pseudo-hash element
785 (F) You said something like C<< local $ar->{'key'} >>, where $ar is a
786 reference to a pseudo-hash. That hasn't been implemented yet, but you
787 can get a similar effect by localizing the corresponding array element
788 directly -- C<< local $ar->[$ar->[0]{'key'}] >>.
790 =item Can't localize through a reference
792 (F) You said something like C<local $$ref>, which Perl can't currently
793 handle, because when it goes to restore the old value of whatever $ref
794 pointed to after the scope of the local() is finished, it can't be sure
795 that $ref will still be a reference.
797 =item Can't locate %s
799 (F) You said to C<do> (or C<require>, or C<use>) a file that couldn't be
800 found. Perl looks for the file in all the locations mentioned in @INC,
801 unless the file name included the full path to the file. Perhaps you
802 need to set the PERL5LIB or PERL5OPT environment variable to say where
803 the extra library is, or maybe the script needs to add the library name
804 to @INC. Or maybe you just misspelled the name of the file. See
805 L<perlfunc/require> and L<lib>.
807 =item Can't locate auto/%s.al in @INC
809 (F) A function (or method) was called in a package which allows
810 autoload, but there is no function to autoload. Most probable causes
811 are a misprint in a function/method name or a failure to C<AutoSplit>
812 the file, say, by doing C<make install>.
814 =item Can't locate object method "%s" via package "%s"
816 (F) You called a method correctly, and it correctly indicated a package
817 functioning as a class, but that package doesn't define that particular
818 method, nor does any of its base classes. See L<perlobj>.
820 =item Can't locate PerlIO%s
822 (F) You tried to use in open() a PerlIO layer that does not exist,
823 e.g. open(FH, ">:nosuchlayer", "somefile").
825 =item (perhaps you forgot to load "%s"?)
827 (F) This is an educated guess made in conjunction with the message
828 "Can't locate object method \"%s\" via package \"%s\"". It often means
829 that a method requires a package that has not been loaded.
831 =item Can't locate package %s for @%s::ISA
833 (W syntax) The @ISA array contained the name of another package that
834 doesn't seem to exist.
836 =item Can't make list assignment to \%ENV on this system
838 (F) List assignment to %ENV is not supported on some systems, notably
841 =item Can't modify %s in %s
843 (F) You aren't allowed to assign to the item indicated, or otherwise try
844 to change it, such as with an auto-increment.
846 =item Can't modify nonexistent substring
848 (P) The internal routine that does assignment to a substr() was handed
851 =item Can't modify non-lvalue subroutine call
853 (F) Subroutines meant to be used in lvalue context should be declared as
854 such, see L<perlsub/"Lvalue subroutines">.
856 =item Can't msgrcv to read-only var
858 (F) The target of a msgrcv must be modifiable to be used as a receive
861 =item Can't "next" outside a loop block
863 (F) A "next" statement was executed to reiterate the current block, but
864 there isn't a current block. Note that an "if" or "else" block doesn't
865 count as a "loopish" block, as doesn't a block given to sort(), map() or
866 grep(). You can usually double the curlies to get the same effect
867 though, because the inner curlies will be considered a block that loops
868 once. See L<perlfunc/next>.
870 =item Can't open %s: %s
872 (S inplace) The implicit opening of a file through use of the C<< <> >>
873 filehandle, either implicitly under the C<-n> or C<-p> command-line
874 switches, or explicitly, failed for the indicated reason. Usually this
875 is because you don't have read permission for a file which you named on
878 =item Can't open a reference
880 (W io) You tried to open a scalar reference for reading or writing,
881 using the 3-arg open() syntax :
885 but your version of perl is compiled without perlio, and this form of
886 open is not supported.
888 =item Can't open bidirectional pipe
890 (W pipe) You tried to say C<open(CMD, "|cmd|")>, which is not supported.
891 You can try any of several modules in the Perl library to do this, such
892 as IPC::Open2. Alternately, direct the pipe's output to a file using
893 ">", and then read it in under a different file handle.
895 =item Can't open error file %s as stderr
897 (F) An error peculiar to VMS. Perl does its own command line
898 redirection, and couldn't open the file specified after '2>' or '2>>' on
899 the command line for writing.
901 =item Can't open input file %s as stdin
903 (F) An error peculiar to VMS. Perl does its own command line
904 redirection, and couldn't open the file specified after '<' on the
905 command line for reading.
907 =item Can't open output file %s as stdout
909 (F) An error peculiar to VMS. Perl does its own command line
910 redirection, and couldn't open the file specified after '>' or '>>' on
911 the command line for writing.
913 =item Can't open output pipe (name: %s)
915 (P) An error peculiar to VMS. Perl does its own command line
916 redirection, and couldn't open the pipe into which to send data destined
919 =item Can't open perl script%s: %s
921 (F) The script you specified can't be opened for the indicated reason.
923 =item Can't read CRTL environ
925 (S) A warning peculiar to VMS. Perl tried to read an element of %ENV
926 from the CRTL's internal environment array and discovered the array was
927 missing. You need to figure out where your CRTL misplaced its environ
928 or define F<PERL_ENV_TABLES> (see L<perlvms>) so that environ is not
931 =item Can't redefine active sort subroutine %s
933 (F) Perl optimizes the internal handling of sort subroutines and keeps
934 pointers into them. You tried to redefine one such sort subroutine when
935 it was currently active, which is not allowed. If you really want to do
936 this, you should write C<sort { &func } @x> instead of C<sort func @x>.
938 =item Can't "redo" outside a loop block
940 (F) A "redo" statement was executed to restart the current block, but
941 there isn't a current block. Note that an "if" or "else" block doesn't
942 count as a "loopish" block, as doesn't a block given to sort(), map()
943 or grep(). You can usually double the curlies to get the same effect
944 though, because the inner curlies will be considered a block that
945 loops once. See L<perlfunc/redo>.
947 =item Can't remove %s: %s, skipping file
949 (S inplace) You requested an inplace edit without creating a backup
950 file. Perl was unable to remove the original file to replace it with
951 the modified file. The file was left unmodified.
953 =item Can't rename %s to %s: %s, skipping file
955 (S inplace) The rename done by the B<-i> switch failed for some reason,
956 probably because you don't have write permission to the directory.
958 =item Can't reopen input pipe (name: %s) in binary mode
960 (P) An error peculiar to VMS. Perl thought stdin was a pipe, and tried
961 to reopen it to accept binary data. Alas, it failed.
963 =item Can't resolve method `%s' overloading `%s' in package `%s'
965 (F|P) Error resolving overloading specified by a method name (as opposed
966 to a subroutine reference): no such method callable via the package. If
967 method name is C<???>, this is an internal error.
969 =item Can't reswap uid and euid
971 (P) The setreuid() call failed for some reason in the setuid emulator of
974 =item Can't return %s from lvalue subroutine
976 (F) Perl detected an attempt to return illegal lvalues (such as
977 temporary or readonly values) from a subroutine used as an lvalue. This
980 =item Can't return %s to lvalue scalar context
982 (F) You tried to return a complete array or hash from an lvalue subroutine,
983 but you called the subroutine in a way that made Perl think you meant
984 to return only one value. You probably meant to write parentheses around
985 the call to the subroutine, which tell Perl that the call should be in
988 =item Can't return outside a subroutine
990 (F) The return statement was executed in mainline code, that is, where
991 there was no subroutine call to return out of. See L<perlsub>.
993 =item Can't stat script "%s"
995 (P) For some reason you can't fstat() the script even though you have it
996 open already. Bizarre.
998 =item Can't swap uid and euid
1000 (P) The setreuid() call failed for some reason in the setuid emulator of
1003 =item Can't take log of %g
1005 (F) For ordinary real numbers, you can't take the logarithm of a
1006 negative number or zero. There's a Math::Complex package that comes
1007 standard with Perl, though, if you really want to do that for the
1010 =item Can't take sqrt of %g
1012 (F) For ordinary real numbers, you can't take the square root of a
1013 negative number. There's a Math::Complex package that comes standard
1014 with Perl, though, if you really want to do that.
1016 =item Can't undef active subroutine
1018 (F) You can't undefine a routine that's currently running. You can,
1019 however, redefine it while it's running, and you can even undef the
1020 redefined subroutine while the old routine is running. Go figure.
1024 (F) You tried to unshift an "unreal" array that can't be unshifted, such
1025 as the main Perl stack.
1027 =item Can't upgrade that kind of scalar
1029 (P) The internal sv_upgrade routine adds "members" to an SV, making it
1030 into a more specialized kind of SV. The top several SV types are so
1031 specialized, however, that they cannot be interconverted. This message
1032 indicates that such a conversion was attempted.
1034 =item Can't upgrade to undef
1036 (P) The undefined SV is the bottom of the totem pole, in the scheme of
1037 upgradability. Upgrading to undef indicates an error in the code
1040 =item Can't use an undefined value as %s reference
1042 (F) A value used as either a hard reference or a symbolic reference must
1043 be a defined value. This helps to delurk some insidious errors.
1045 =item Can't use anonymous symbol table for method lookup
1047 (P) The internal routine that does method lookup was handed a symbol
1048 table that doesn't have a name. Symbol tables can become anonymous
1049 for example by undefining stashes: C<undef %Some::Package::>.
1051 =item Can't use bareword ("%s") as %s ref while "strict refs" in use
1053 (F) Only hard references are allowed by "strict refs". Symbolic
1054 references are disallowed. See L<perlref>.
1056 =item Can't use %! because Errno.pm is not available
1058 (F) The first time the %! hash is used, perl automatically loads the
1059 Errno.pm module. The Errno module is expected to tie the %! hash to
1060 provide symbolic names for C<$!> errno values.
1062 =item Can't use %s for loop variable
1064 (F) Only a simple scalar variable may be used as a loop variable on a
1067 =item Can't use global %s in "my"
1069 (F) You tried to declare a magical variable as a lexical variable. This
1070 is not allowed, because the magic can be tied to only one location
1071 (namely the global variable) and it would be incredibly confusing to
1072 have variables in your program that looked like magical variables but
1075 =item Can't use "my %s" in sort comparison
1077 (F) The global variables $a and $b are reserved for sort comparisons.
1078 You mentioned $a or $b in the same line as the <=> or cmp operator,
1079 and the variable had earlier been declared as a lexical variable.
1080 Either qualify the sort variable with the package name, or rename the
1083 =item Can't use %s ref as %s ref
1085 (F) You've mixed up your reference types. You have to dereference a
1086 reference of the type needed. You can use the ref() function to
1087 test the type of the reference, if need be.
1089 =item Can't use string ("%s") as %s ref while "strict refs" in use
1091 (F) Only hard references are allowed by "strict refs". Symbolic
1092 references are disallowed. See L<perlref>.
1094 =item Can't use subscript on %s
1096 (F) The compiler tried to interpret a bracketed expression as a
1097 subscript. But to the left of the brackets was an expression that
1098 didn't look like an array reference, or anything else subscriptable.
1100 =item Can't use \%c to mean $%c in expression
1102 (W syntax) In an ordinary expression, backslash is a unary operator that
1103 creates a reference to its argument. The use of backslash to indicate a
1104 backreference to a matched substring is valid only as part of a regular
1105 expression pattern. Trying to do this in ordinary Perl code produces a
1106 value that prints out looking like SCALAR(0xdecaf). Use the $1 form
1109 =item Can't weaken a nonreference
1111 (F) You attempted to weaken something that was not a reference. Only
1112 references can be weakened.
1114 =item Can't x= to read-only value
1116 (F) You tried to repeat a constant value (often the undefined value)
1117 with an assignment operator, which implies modifying the value itself.
1118 Perhaps you need to copy the value to a temporary, and repeat that.
1120 =item Character in "C" format wrapped
1126 where $x is either less than 0 or more than 255; the C<"C"> format is
1127 only for encoding native operating system characters (ASCII, EBCDIC,
1128 and so on) and not for Unicode characters, so Perl behaved as if you meant
1132 If you actually want to pack Unicode codepoints, use the C<"U"> format
1135 =item Character in "c" format wrapped
1141 where $x is either less than -128 or more than 127; the C<"c"> format
1142 is only for encoding native operating system characters (ASCII, EBCDIC,
1143 and so on) and not for Unicode characters, so Perl behaved as if you meant
1145 pack("c", $x & 255);
1147 If you actually want to pack Unicode codepoints, use the C<"U"> format
1150 =item close() on unopened filehandle %s
1152 (W unopened) You tried to close a filehandle that was never opened.
1154 =item %s: Command not found
1156 (A) You've accidentally run your script through B<csh> instead of Perl.
1157 Check the #! line, or manually feed your script into Perl yourself.
1159 =item Compilation failed in require
1161 (F) Perl could not compile a file specified in a C<require> statement.
1162 Perl uses this generic message when none of the errors that it
1163 encountered were severe enough to halt compilation immediately.
1165 =item Complex regular subexpression recursion limit (%d) exceeded
1167 (W regexp) The regular expression engine uses recursion in complex
1168 situations where back-tracking is required. Recursion depth is limited
1169 to 32766, or perhaps less in architectures where the stack cannot grow
1170 arbitrarily. ("Simple" and "medium" situations are handled without
1171 recursion and are not subject to a limit.) Try shortening the string
1172 under examination; looping in Perl code (e.g. with C<while>) rather than
1173 in the regular expression engine; or rewriting the regular expression so
1174 that it is simpler or backtracks less. (See L<perlfaq2> for information
1175 on I<Mastering Regular Expressions>.)
1177 =item cond_broadcast() called on unlocked variable
1179 (W threads) Within a thread-enabled program, you tried to call
1180 cond_broadcast() on a variable which wasn't locked. The cond_broadcast()
1181 function is used to wake up another thread that is waiting in a
1182 cond_wait(). To ensure that the signal isn't sent before the other thread
1183 has a chance to enter the wait, it is usual for the signaling thread to
1184 first wait for a lock on variable. This lock attempt will only succeed
1185 after the other thread has entered cond_wait() and thus relinquished the
1189 =item cond_signal() called on unlocked variable
1191 (W threads) Within a thread-enabled program, you tried to call
1192 cond_signal() on a variable which wasn't locked. The cond_signal()
1193 function is used to wake up another thread that is waiting in a
1194 cond_wait(). To ensure that the signal isn't sent before the other thread
1195 has a chance to enter the wait, it is usual for the signaling thread to
1196 first wait for a lock on variable. This lock attempt will only succeed
1197 after the other thread has entered cond_wait() and thus relinquished the
1200 =item connect() on closed socket %s
1202 (W closed) You tried to do a connect on a closed socket. Did you forget
1203 to check the return value of your socket() call? See
1204 L<perlfunc/connect>.
1206 =item Constant(%s)%s: %s
1208 (F) The parser found inconsistencies either while attempting to define
1209 an overloaded constant, or when trying to find the character name
1210 specified in the C<\N{...}> escape. Perhaps you forgot to load the
1211 corresponding C<overload> or C<charnames> pragma? See L<charnames> and
1214 =item Constant is not %s reference
1216 (F) A constant value (perhaps declared using the C<use constant> pragma)
1217 is being dereferenced, but it amounts to the wrong type of reference.
1218 The message indicates the type of reference that was expected. This
1219 usually indicates a syntax error in dereferencing the constant value.
1220 See L<perlsub/"Constant Functions"> and L<constant>.
1222 =item Constant subroutine %s redefined
1224 (S) You redefined a subroutine which had previously been
1225 eligible for inlining. See L<perlsub/"Constant Functions"> for
1226 commentary and workarounds.
1228 =item Constant subroutine %s undefined
1230 (W misc) You undefined a subroutine which had previously been eligible
1231 for inlining. See L<perlsub/"Constant Functions"> for commentary and
1234 =item Copy method did not return a reference
1236 (F) The method which overloads "=" is buggy. See
1237 L<overload/Copy Constructor>.
1239 =item CORE::%s is not a keyword
1241 (F) The CORE:: namespace is reserved for Perl keywords.
1243 =item corrupted regexp pointers
1245 (P) The regular expression engine got confused by what the regular
1246 expression compiler gave it.
1248 =item corrupted regexp program
1250 (P) The regular expression engine got passed a regexp program without a
1253 =item Corrupt malloc ptr 0x%lx at 0x%lx
1255 (P) The malloc package that comes with Perl had an internal failure.
1257 =item C<-p> destination: %s
1259 (F) An error occurred during the implicit output invoked by the C<-p>
1260 command-line switch. (This output goes to STDOUT unless you've
1261 redirected it with select().)
1263 =item C<-T> and C<-B> not implemented on filehandles
1265 (F) Perl can't peek at the stdio buffer of filehandles when it doesn't
1266 know about your kind of stdio. You'll have to use a filename instead.
1268 =item Deep recursion on subroutine "%s"
1270 (W recursion) This subroutine has called itself (directly or indirectly)
1271 100 times more than it has returned. This probably indicates an
1272 infinite recursion, unless you're writing strange benchmark programs, in
1273 which case it indicates something else.
1275 =item defined(@array) is deprecated
1277 (D deprecated) defined() is not usually useful on arrays because it
1278 checks for an undefined I<scalar> value. If you want to see if the
1279 array is empty, just use C<if (@array) { # not empty }> for example.
1281 =item defined(%hash) is deprecated
1283 (D deprecated) defined() is not usually useful on hashes because it
1284 checks for an undefined I<scalar> value. If you want to see if the hash
1285 is empty, just use C<if (%hash) { # not empty }> for example.
1287 =item %s defines neither package nor VERSION--version check failed
1289 (F) You said something like "use Module 42" but in the Module file
1290 there are neither package declarations nor a C<$VERSION>.
1292 =item Delimiter for here document is too long
1294 (F) In a here document construct like C<<<FOO>, the label C<FOO> is too
1295 long for Perl to handle. You have to be seriously twisted to write code
1296 that triggers this error.
1298 =item Did not produce a valid header
1302 =item %s did not return a true value
1304 (F) A required (or used) file must return a true value to indicate that
1305 it compiled correctly and ran its initialization code correctly. It's
1306 traditional to end such a file with a "1;", though any true value would
1307 do. See L<perlfunc/require>.
1309 =item (Did you mean &%s instead?)
1311 (W) You probably referred to an imported subroutine &FOO as $FOO or some
1314 =item (Did you mean "local" instead of "our"?)
1316 (W misc) Remember that "our" does not localize the declared global
1317 variable. You have declared it again in the same lexical scope, which
1320 =item (Did you mean $ or @ instead of %?)
1322 (W) You probably said %hash{$key} when you meant $hash{$key} or
1323 @hash{@keys}. On the other hand, maybe you just meant %hash and got
1328 (F) You passed die() an empty string (the equivalent of C<die "">) or
1329 you called it with no args and both C<$@> and C<$_> were empty.
1331 =item Document contains no data
1335 =item %s does not define %s::VERSION--version check failed
1337 (F) You said something like "use Module 42" but the Module did not
1338 define a C<$VERSION.>
1340 =item Don't know how to handle magic of type '%s'
1342 (P) The internal handling of magical variables has been cursed.
1344 =item do_study: out of memory
1346 (P) This should have been caught by safemalloc() instead.
1348 =item (Do you need to predeclare %s?)
1350 (S) This is an educated guess made in conjunction with the message "%s
1351 found where operator expected". It often means a subroutine or module
1352 name is being referenced that hasn't been declared yet. This may be
1353 because of ordering problems in your file, or because of a missing
1354 "sub", "package", "require", or "use" statement. If you're referencing
1355 something that isn't defined yet, you don't actually have to define the
1356 subroutine or package before the current location. You can use an empty
1357 "sub foo;" or "package FOO;" to enter a "forward" declaration.
1359 =item dump() better written as CORE::dump()
1361 (W misc) You used the obsolescent C<dump()> built-in function, without fully
1362 qualifying it as C<CORE::dump()>. Maybe it's a typo. See L<perlfunc/dump>.
1364 =item Duplicate free() ignored
1366 (S malloc) An internal routine called free() on something that had
1369 =item elseif should be elsif
1371 (S) There is no keyword "elseif" in Perl because Larry thinks it's ugly.
1372 Your code will be interpreted as an attempt to call a method named
1373 "elseif" for the class returned by the following block. This is
1374 unlikely to be what you want.
1378 (F) C<\p> and C<\P> are used to introduce a named Unicode property, as
1379 described in L<perlunicode> and L<perlre>. You used C<\p> or C<\P> in
1380 a regular expression without specifying the property name.
1382 =item entering effective %s failed
1384 (F) While under the C<use filetest> pragma, switching the real and
1385 effective uids or gids failed.
1387 =item Error converting file specification %s
1389 (F) An error peculiar to VMS. Because Perl may have to deal with file
1390 specifications in either VMS or Unix syntax, it converts them to a
1391 single form when it must operate on them directly. Either you've passed
1392 an invalid file specification to Perl, or you've found a case the
1393 conversion routines don't handle. Drat.
1395 =item %s: Eval-group in insecure regular expression
1397 (F) Perl detected tainted data when trying to compile a regular
1398 expression that contains the C<(?{ ... })> zero-width assertion, which
1399 is unsafe. See L<perlre/(?{ code })>, and L<perlsec>.
1401 =item %s: Eval-group not allowed at run time
1403 (F) Perl tried to compile a regular expression containing the
1404 C<(?{ ... })> zero-width assertion at run time, as it would when the
1405 pattern contains interpolated values. Since that is a security risk, it
1406 is not allowed. If you insist, you may still do this by explicitly
1407 building the pattern from an interpolated string at run time and using
1408 that in an eval(). See L<perlre/(?{ code })>.
1410 =item %s: Eval-group not allowed, use re 'eval'
1412 (F) A regular expression contained the C<(?{ ... })> zero-width
1413 assertion, but that construct is only allowed when the C<use re 'eval'>
1414 pragma is in effect. See L<perlre/(?{ code })>.
1416 =item Excessively long <> operator
1418 (F) The contents of a <> operator may not exceed the maximum size of a
1419 Perl identifier. If you're just trying to glob a long list of
1420 filenames, try using the glob() operator, or put the filenames into a
1421 variable and glob that.
1423 =item exec? I'm not *that* kind of operating system
1425 (F) The C<exec> function is not implemented in MacPerl. See L<perlport>.
1427 =item Execution of %s aborted due to compilation errors
1429 (F) The final summary message when a Perl compilation fails.
1431 =item Exiting eval via %s
1433 (W exiting) You are exiting an eval by unconventional means, such as a
1434 goto, or a loop control statement.
1436 =item Exiting format via %s
1438 (W exiting) You are exiting a format by unconventional means, such as a
1439 goto, or a loop control statement.
1441 =item Exiting pseudo-block via %s
1443 (W exiting) You are exiting a rather special block construct (like a
1444 sort block or subroutine) by unconventional means, such as a goto, or a
1445 loop control statement. See L<perlfunc/sort>.
1447 =item Exiting subroutine via %s
1449 (W exiting) You are exiting a subroutine by unconventional means, such
1450 as a goto, or a loop control statement.
1452 =item Exiting substitution via %s
1454 (W exiting) You are exiting a substitution by unconventional means, such
1455 as a return, a goto, or a loop control statement.
1457 =item Explicit blessing to '' (assuming package main)
1459 (W misc) You are blessing a reference to a zero length string. This has
1460 the effect of blessing the reference into the package main. This is
1461 usually not what you want. Consider providing a default target package,
1462 e.g. bless($ref, $p || 'MyPackage');
1464 =item %s: Expression syntax
1466 (A) You've accidentally run your script through B<csh> instead of Perl.
1467 Check the #! line, or manually feed your script into Perl yourself.
1469 =item %s failed--call queue aborted
1471 (F) An untrapped exception was raised while executing a CHECK, INIT, or
1472 END subroutine. Processing of the remainder of the queue of such
1473 routines has been prematurely ended.
1475 =item False [] range "%s" in regex; marked by <-- HERE in m/%s/
1477 (W regexp) A character class range must start and end at a literal
1478 character, not another character class like C<\d> or C<[:alpha:]>. The "-"
1479 in your false range is interpreted as a literal "-". Consider quoting the
1480 "-", "\-". The <-- HERE shows in the regular expression about where the
1481 problem was discovered. See L<perlre>.
1483 =item Fatal VMS error at %s, line %d
1485 (P) An error peculiar to VMS. Something untoward happened in a VMS
1486 system service or RTL routine; Perl's exit status should provide more
1487 details. The filename in "at %s" and the line number in "line %d" tell
1488 you which section of the Perl source code is distressed.
1490 =item fcntl is not implemented
1492 (F) Your machine apparently doesn't implement fcntl(). What is this, a
1493 PDP-11 or something?
1495 =item Filehandle %s opened only for input
1497 (W io) You tried to write on a read-only filehandle. If you intended it
1498 to be a read-write filehandle, you needed to open it with "+<" or "+>"
1499 or "+>>" instead of with "<" or nothing. If you intended only to write
1500 the file, use ">" or ">>". See L<perlfunc/open>.
1501 The warning will also occur if STDOUT (file descriptor 1) or STDERR
1502 (file descriptor 2) is opened for input, this is a pre-emptive warning in
1503 case some other part of your program or a child process is expecting STDOUT
1504 and STDERR to be writable. This can happen accidentally if you
1505 C<close(STDOUT)> or STDERR and then C<open> an unrelated handle which
1506 will resuse the lowest numbered available descriptor.
1508 =item Filehandle %s opened only for output
1510 (W io) You tried to read from a filehandle opened only for writing.
1511 If you intended it to be a read/write filehandle, you needed to open it
1512 with "+<" or "+>" or "+>>" instead of with "<" or nothing. If you
1513 intended only to read from the file, use "<". See L<perlfunc/open>.
1514 The warning will also occur if STDIN (file descriptor 0) is opened
1515 for output - this is a pre-emptive warning in case some other part of your
1516 program or a child process is expecting STDIN to be readable.
1517 This can happen accidentally if you C<close(STDIN)> and then C<open> an
1518 unrelated handle which will resuse the lowest numbered available
1521 =item Final $ should be \$ or $name
1523 (F) You must now decide whether the final $ in a string was meant to be
1524 a literal dollar sign, or was meant to introduce a variable name that
1525 happens to be missing. So you have to put either the backslash or the
1528 =item Final @ should be \@ or @name
1530 (F) You must now decide whether the final @ in a string was meant to be
1531 a literal "at" sign, or was meant to introduce a variable name that
1532 happens to be missing. So you have to put either the backslash or the
1535 =item flock() on closed filehandle %s
1537 (W closed) The filehandle you're attempting to flock() got itself closed
1538 some time before now. Check your control flow. flock() operates on
1539 filehandles. Are you attempting to call flock() on a dirhandle by the
1542 =item Quantifier follows nothing in regex;
1544 marked by <-- HERE in m/%s/
1546 (F) You started a regular expression with a quantifier. Backslash it if you
1547 meant it literally. The <-- HERE shows in the regular expression about
1548 where the problem was discovered. See L<perlre>.
1550 =item Format not terminated
1552 (F) A format must be terminated by a line with a solitary dot. Perl got
1553 to the end of your file without finding such a line.
1555 =item Format %s redefined
1557 (W redefine) You redefined a format. To suppress this warning, say
1560 no warnings 'redefine';
1561 eval "format NAME =...";
1564 =item Found = in conditional, should be ==
1574 (or something like that).
1576 =item %s found where operator expected
1578 (S) The Perl lexer knows whether to expect a term or an operator. If it
1579 sees what it knows to be a term when it was expecting to see an
1580 operator, it gives you this warning. Usually it indicates that an
1581 operator or delimiter was omitted, such as a semicolon.
1583 =item gdbm store returned %d, errno %d, key "%s"
1585 (S) A warning from the GDBM_File extension that a store failed.
1587 =item gethostent not implemented
1589 (F) Your C library apparently doesn't implement gethostent(), probably
1590 because if it did, it'd feel morally obligated to return every hostname
1593 =item get%sname() on closed socket %s
1595 (W closed) You tried to get a socket or peer socket name on a closed
1596 socket. Did you forget to check the return value of your socket() call?
1598 =item getpwnam returned invalid UIC %#o for user "%s"
1600 (S) A warning peculiar to VMS. The call to C<sys$getuai> underlying the
1601 C<getpwnam> operator returned an invalid UIC.
1603 =item getsockopt() on closed socket %s
1605 (W closed) You tried to get a socket option on a closed socket. Did you
1606 forget to check the return value of your socket() call? See
1607 L<perlfunc/getsockopt>.
1609 =item Global symbol "%s" requires explicit package name
1611 (F) You've said "use strict vars", which indicates that all variables
1612 must either be lexically scoped (using "my"), declared beforehand using
1613 "our", or explicitly qualified to say which package the global variable
1616 =item glob failed (%s)
1618 (W glob) Something went wrong with the external program(s) used for
1619 C<glob> and C<< <*.c> >>. Usually, this means that you supplied a
1620 C<glob> pattern that caused the external program to fail and exit with a
1621 nonzero status. If the message indicates that the abnormal exit
1622 resulted in a coredump, this may also mean that your csh (C shell) is
1623 broken. If so, you should change all of the csh-related variables in
1624 config.sh: If you have tcsh, make the variables refer to it as if it
1625 were csh (e.g. C<full_csh='/usr/bin/tcsh'>); otherwise, make them all
1626 empty (except that C<d_csh> should be C<'undef'>) so that Perl will
1627 think csh is missing. In either case, after editing config.sh, run
1628 C<./Configure -S> and rebuild Perl.
1630 =item Glob not terminated
1632 (F) The lexer saw a left angle bracket in a place where it was expecting
1633 a term, so it's looking for the corresponding right angle bracket, and
1634 not finding it. Chances are you left some needed parentheses out
1635 earlier in the line, and you really meant a "less than".
1637 =item Got an error from DosAllocMem
1639 (P) An error peculiar to OS/2. Most probably you're using an obsolete
1640 version of Perl, and this should not happen anyway.
1642 =item goto must have label
1644 (F) Unlike with "next" or "last", you're not allowed to goto an
1645 unspecified destination. See L<perlfunc/goto>.
1647 =item %s-group starts with a count
1649 (F) In pack/unpack a ()-group started with a count. A count is
1650 supposed to follow something: a template character or a ()-group.
1652 =item %s had compilation errors
1654 (F) The final summary message when a C<perl -c> fails.
1656 =item Had to create %s unexpectedly
1658 (S internal) A routine asked for a symbol from a symbol table that ought
1659 to have existed already, but for some reason it didn't, and had to be
1660 created on an emergency basis to prevent a core dump.
1662 =item Hash %%s missing the % in argument %d of %s()
1664 (D deprecated) Really old Perl let you omit the % on hash names in some
1665 spots. This is now heavily deprecated.
1667 =item %s has too many errors
1669 (F) The parser has given up trying to parse the program after 10 errors.
1670 Further error messages would likely be uninformative.
1672 =item Hexadecimal number > 0xffffffff non-portable
1674 (W portable) The hexadecimal number you specified is larger than 2**32-1
1675 (4294967295) and therefore non-portable between systems. See
1676 L<perlport> for more on portability concerns.
1678 =item Identifier too long
1680 (F) Perl limits identifiers (names for variables, functions, etc.) to
1681 about 250 characters for simple names, and somewhat more for compound
1682 names (like C<$A::B>). You've exceeded Perl's limits. Future versions
1683 of Perl are likely to eliminate these arbitrary limitations.
1685 =item Illegal binary digit %s
1687 (F) You used a digit other than 0 or 1 in a binary number.
1689 =item Illegal binary digit %s ignored
1691 (W digit) You may have tried to use a digit other than 0 or 1 in a
1692 binary number. Interpretation of the binary number stopped before the
1695 =item Illegal character %s (carriage return)
1697 (F) Perl normally treats carriage returns in the program text as it
1698 would any other whitespace, which means you should never see this error
1699 when Perl was built using standard options. For some reason, your
1700 version of Perl appears to have been built without this support. Talk
1701 to your Perl administrator.
1703 =item Illegal character in prototype for %s : %s
1705 (W syntax) An illegal character was found in a prototype declaration. Legal
1706 characters in prototypes are $, @, %, *, ;, [, ], &, and \.
1708 =item Illegal division by zero
1710 (F) You tried to divide a number by 0. Either something was wrong in
1711 your logic, or you need to put a conditional in to guard against
1714 =item Illegal hexadecimal digit %s ignored
1716 (W digit) You may have tried to use a character other than 0 - 9 or
1717 A - F, a - f in a hexadecimal number. Interpretation of the hexadecimal
1718 number stopped before the illegal character.
1720 =item Illegal modulus zero
1722 (F) You tried to divide a number by 0 to get the remainder. Most
1723 numbers don't take to this kindly.
1725 =item Illegal number of bits in vec
1727 (F) The number of bits in vec() (the third argument) must be a power of
1728 two from 1 to 32 (or 64, if your platform supports that).
1730 =item Illegal octal digit %s
1732 (F) You used an 8 or 9 in an octal number.
1734 =item Illegal octal digit %s ignored
1736 (W digit) You may have tried to use an 8 or 9 in an octal number.
1737 Interpretation of the octal number stopped before the 8 or 9.
1739 =item Illegal switch in PERL5OPT: %s
1741 (X) The PERL5OPT environment variable may only be used to set the
1742 following switches: B<-[DIMUdmtw]>.
1744 =item Ill-formed CRTL environ value "%s"
1746 (W internal) A warning peculiar to VMS. Perl tried to read the CRTL's
1747 internal environ array, and encountered an element without the C<=>
1748 delimiter used to separate keys from values. The element is ignored.
1750 =item Ill-formed message in prime_env_iter: |%s|
1752 (W internal) A warning peculiar to VMS. Perl tried to read a logical
1753 name or CLI symbol definition when preparing to iterate over %ENV, and
1754 didn't see the expected delimiter between key and value, so the line was
1757 =item (in cleanup) %s
1759 (W misc) This prefix usually indicates that a DESTROY() method raised
1760 the indicated exception. Since destructors are usually called by the
1761 system at arbitrary points during execution, and often a vast number of
1762 times, the warning is issued only once for any number of failures that
1763 would otherwise result in the same message being repeated.
1765 Failure of user callbacks dispatched using the C<G_KEEPERR> flag could
1766 also result in this warning. See L<perlcall/G_KEEPERR>.
1768 =item In EBCDIC the v-string components cannot exceed 2147483647
1770 (F) An error peculiar to EBCDIC. Internally, v-strings are stored as
1771 Unicode code points, and encoded in EBCDIC as UTF-EBCDIC. The UTF-EBCDIC
1772 encoding is limited to code points no larger than 2147483647 (0x7FFFFFFF).
1774 =item Insecure dependency in %s
1776 (F) You tried to do something that the tainting mechanism didn't like.
1777 The tainting mechanism is turned on when you're running setuid or
1778 setgid, or when you specify B<-T> to turn it on explicitly. The
1779 tainting mechanism labels all data that's derived directly or indirectly
1780 from the user, who is considered to be unworthy of your trust. If any
1781 such data is used in a "dangerous" operation, you get this error. See
1782 L<perlsec> for more information.
1784 =item Insecure directory in %s
1786 (F) You can't use system(), exec(), or a piped open in a setuid or
1787 setgid script if C<$ENV{PATH}> contains a directory that is writable by
1788 the world. See L<perlsec>.
1790 =item Insecure $ENV{%s} while running %s
1792 (F) You can't use system(), exec(), or a piped open in a setuid or
1793 setgid script if any of C<$ENV{PATH}>, C<$ENV{IFS}>, C<$ENV{CDPATH}>,
1794 C<$ENV{ENV}> or C<$ENV{BASH_ENV}> are derived from data supplied (or
1795 potentially supplied) by the user. The script must set the path to a
1796 known value, using trustworthy data. See L<perlsec>.
1798 =item Integer overflow in %s number
1800 (W overflow) The hexadecimal, octal or binary number you have specified
1801 either as a literal or as an argument to hex() or oct() is too big for
1802 your architecture, and has been converted to a floating point number.
1803 On a 32-bit architecture the largest hexadecimal, octal or binary number
1804 representable without overflow is 0xFFFFFFFF, 037777777777, or
1805 0b11111111111111111111111111111111 respectively. Note that Perl
1806 transparently promotes all numbers to a floating point representation
1807 internally--subject to loss of precision errors in subsequent
1810 =item Internal disaster in regex; marked by <-- HERE in m/%s/
1812 (P) Something went badly wrong in the regular expression parser.
1813 The <-- HERE shows in the regular expression about where the problem was
1816 =item Internal inconsistency in tracking vforks
1818 (S) A warning peculiar to VMS. Perl keeps track of the number of times
1819 you've called C<fork> and C<exec>, to determine whether the current call
1820 to C<exec> should affect the current script or a subprocess (see
1821 L<perlvms/"exec LIST">). Somehow, this count has become scrambled, so
1822 Perl is making a guess and treating this C<exec> as a request to
1823 terminate the Perl script and execute the specified command.
1825 =item Internal urp in regex; marked by <-- HERE in m/%s/
1827 (P) Something went badly awry in the regular expression parser. The
1828 <-- HERE shows in the regular expression about where the problem was
1831 =item %s (...) interpreted as function
1833 (W syntax) You've run afoul of the rule that says that any list operator
1834 followed by parentheses turns into a function, with all the list
1835 operators arguments found inside the parentheses. See
1836 L<perlop/Terms and List Operators (Leftward)>.
1838 =item Invalid %s attribute: %s
1840 The indicated attribute for a subroutine or variable was not recognized
1841 by Perl or by a user-supplied handler. See L<attributes>.
1843 =item Invalid %s attributes: %s
1845 The indicated attributes for a subroutine or variable were not
1846 recognized by Perl or by a user-supplied handler. See L<attributes>.
1848 =item Invalid conversion in %s: "%s"
1850 (W printf) Perl does not understand the given format conversion. See
1851 L<perlfunc/sprintf>.
1853 =item Invalid [] range "%s" in regex; marked by <-- HERE in m/%s/
1855 (F) The range specified in a character class had a minimum character
1856 greater than the maximum character. One possibility is that you forgot the
1857 C<{}> from your ending C<\x{}> - C<\x> without the curly braces can go only
1858 up to C<ff>. The <-- HERE shows in the regular expression about where the
1859 problem was discovered. See L<perlre>.
1861 =item Invalid [] range "%s" in transliteration operator
1863 (F) The range specified in the tr/// or y/// operator had a minimum
1864 character greater than the maximum character. See L<perlop>.
1866 =item Invalid separator character %s in attribute list
1868 (F) Something other than a colon or whitespace was seen between the
1869 elements of an attribute list. If the previous attribute had a
1870 parenthesised parameter list, perhaps that list was terminated too soon.
1873 =item Invalid type in pack: '%s'
1875 (F) The given character is not a valid pack type. See L<perlfunc/pack>.
1876 (W pack) The given character is not a valid pack type but used to be
1879 =item Invalid type in unpack: '%s'
1881 (F) The given character is not a valid unpack type. See
1883 (W unpack) The given character is not a valid unpack type but used to be
1886 =item ioctl is not implemented
1888 (F) Your machine apparently doesn't implement ioctl(), which is pretty
1889 strange for a machine that supports C.
1891 =item ioctl() on unopened %s
1893 (W unopened) You tried ioctl() on a filehandle that was never opened.
1894 Check you control flow and number of arguments.
1896 =item IO::Socket::atmark not implemented on this architecture
1898 (F) Your machine doesn't implement the sockatmark() functionality,
1899 neither as a system call or an ioctl call (SIOCATMARK).
1901 =item `%s' is not a code reference
1903 (W overload) The second (fourth, sixth, ...) argument of overload::constant
1904 needs to be a code reference. Either an anonymous subroutine, or a reference
1907 =item `%s' is not an overloadable type
1909 (W overload) You tried to overload a constant type the overload package is
1912 =item junk on end of regexp
1914 (P) The regular expression parser is confused.
1916 =item Label not found for "last %s"
1918 (F) You named a loop to break out of, but you're not currently in a loop
1919 of that name, not even if you count where you were called from. See
1922 =item Label not found for "next %s"
1924 (F) You named a loop to continue, but you're not currently in a loop of
1925 that name, not even if you count where you were called from. See
1928 =item Label not found for "redo %s"
1930 (F) You named a loop to restart, but you're not currently in a loop of
1931 that name, not even if you count where you were called from. See
1934 =item leaving effective %s failed
1936 (F) While under the C<use filetest> pragma, switching the real and
1937 effective uids or gids failed.
1939 =item listen() on closed socket %s
1941 (W closed) You tried to do a listen on a closed socket. Did you forget
1942 to check the return value of your socket() call? See
1945 =item lstat() on filehandle %s
1947 (W io) You tried to do an lstat on a filehandle. What did you mean
1948 by that? lstat() makes sense only on filenames. (Perl did a fstat()
1949 instead on the filehandle.)
1951 =item Lvalue subs returning %s not implemented yet
1953 (F) Due to limitations in the current implementation, array and hash
1954 values cannot be returned in subroutines used in lvalue context. See
1955 L<perlsub/"Lvalue subroutines">.
1957 =item Lookbehind longer than %d not implemented in regex;
1959 marked by <-- HERE in m/%s/
1961 (F) There is currently a limit on the length of string which lookbehind can
1962 handle. This restriction may be eased in a future release. The <-- HERE
1963 shows in the regular expression about where the problem was discovered.
1965 =item Malformed PERLLIB_PREFIX
1967 (F) An error peculiar to OS/2. PERLLIB_PREFIX should be of the form
1974 with nonempty prefix1 and prefix2. If C<prefix1> is indeed a prefix of
1975 a builtin library search path, prefix2 is substituted. The error may
1976 appear if components are not found, or are too long. See
1977 "PERLLIB_PREFIX" in L<perlos2>.
1979 =item Malformed prototype for %s: %s
1981 (F) You tried to use a function with a malformed prototype. The
1982 syntax of function prototypes is given a brief compile-time check for
1983 obvious errors like invalid characters. A more rigorous check is run
1984 when the function is called.
1986 =item Malformed UTF-8 character (%s)
1988 Perl detected something that didn't comply with UTF-8 encoding rules.
1990 One possible cause is that you read in data that you thought to be in
1991 UTF-8 but it wasn't (it was for example legacy 8-bit data). Another
1992 possibility is careless use of utf8::upgrade().
1994 =item Malformed UTF-16 surrogate
1996 Perl thought it was reading UTF-16 encoded character data but while
1997 doing it Perl met a malformed Unicode surrogate.
1999 =item %s matches null string many times in regex;
2001 marked by <-- HERE in m/%s/
2003 (W regexp) The pattern you've specified would be an infinite loop if the
2004 regular expression engine didn't specifically check for that. The <-- HERE
2005 shows in the regular expression about where the problem was discovered.
2008 =item "%s" may clash with future reserved word
2010 (W) This warning may be due to running a perl5 script through a perl4
2011 interpreter, especially if the word that is being warned about is
2014 =item % may only be used in unpack
2016 (F) You can't pack a string by supplying a checksum, because the
2017 checksumming process loses information, and you can't go the other way.
2018 See L<perlfunc/unpack>.
2020 =item Method for operation %s not found in package %s during blessing
2022 (F) An attempt was made to specify an entry in an overloading table that
2023 doesn't resolve to a valid subroutine. See L<overload>.
2025 =item Method %s not permitted
2029 =item Might be a runaway multi-line %s string starting on line %d
2031 (S) An advisory indicating that the previous error may have been caused
2032 by a missing delimiter on a string or pattern, because it eventually
2033 ended earlier on the current line.
2035 =item Misplaced _ in number
2037 (W syntax) An underscore (underbar) in a numeric constant did not
2038 separate two digits.
2040 =item Missing %sbrace%s on \N{}
2042 (F) Wrong syntax of character name literal C<\N{charname}> within
2043 double-quotish context.
2045 =item Missing comma after first argument to %s function
2047 (F) While certain functions allow you to specify a filehandle or an
2048 "indirect object" before the argument list, this ain't one of them.
2050 =item Missing command in piped open
2052 (W pipe) You used the C<open(FH, "| command")> or
2053 C<open(FH, "command |")> construction, but the command was missing or
2056 =item Missing name in "my sub"
2058 (F) The reserved syntax for lexically scoped subroutines requires that
2059 they have a name with which they can be found.
2061 =item Missing $ on loop variable
2063 (F) Apparently you've been programming in B<csh> too much. Variables
2064 are always mentioned with the $ in Perl, unlike in the shells, where it
2065 can vary from one line to the next.
2067 =item (Missing operator before %s?)
2069 (S) This is an educated guess made in conjunction with the message "%s
2070 found where operator expected". Often the missing operator is a comma.
2072 =item Missing right brace on %s
2074 (F) Missing right brace in C<\p{...}> or C<\P{...}>.
2076 =item Missing right curly or square bracket
2078 (F) The lexer counted more opening curly or square brackets than closing
2079 ones. As a general rule, you'll find it's missing near the place you
2082 =item (Missing semicolon on previous line?)
2084 (S) This is an educated guess made in conjunction with the message "%s
2085 found where operator expected". Don't automatically put a semicolon on
2086 the previous line just because you saw this message.
2088 =item Modification of a read-only value attempted
2090 (F) You tried, directly or indirectly, to change the value of a
2091 constant. You didn't, of course, try "2 = 1", because the compiler
2092 catches that. But an easy way to do the same thing is:
2094 sub mod { $_[0] = 1 }
2097 Another way is to assign to a substr() that's off the end of the string.
2099 Yet another way is to assign to a C<foreach> loop I<VAR> when I<VAR>
2100 is aliased to a constant in the look I<LIST>:
2103 foreach my $n ($x, 2) {
2104 $n *= 2; # modifies the $x, but fails on attempt to modify the 2
2107 =item Modification of non-creatable array value attempted, %s
2109 (F) You tried to make an array value spring into existence, and the
2110 subscript was probably negative, even counting from end of the array
2113 =item Modification of non-creatable hash value attempted, %s
2115 (P) You tried to make a hash value spring into existence, and it
2116 couldn't be created for some peculiar reason.
2118 =item Module name must be constant
2120 (F) Only a bare module name is allowed as the first argument to a "use".
2122 =item Module name required with -%c option
2124 (F) The C<-M> or C<-m> options say that Perl should load some module, but
2125 you omitted the name of the module. Consult L<perlrun> for full details
2126 about C<-M> and C<-m>.
2128 =item More than one argument to open
2130 (F) The C<open> function has been asked to open multiple files. This
2131 can happen if you are trying to open a pipe to a command that takes a
2132 list of arguments, but have forgotten to specify a piped open mode.
2133 See L<perlfunc/open> for details.
2135 =item msg%s not implemented
2137 (F) You don't have System V message IPC on your system.
2139 =item Multidimensional syntax %s not supported
2141 (W syntax) Multidimensional arrays aren't written like C<$foo[1,2,3]>.
2142 They're written like C<$foo[1][2][3]>, as in C.
2144 =item / must be followed by a*, A* or Z*
2146 (F) You had a pack template indicating a counted-length string,
2147 Currently the only things that can have their length counted are a*, A*
2148 or Z*. See L<perlfunc/pack>.
2150 =item / must be followed by a, A or Z
2152 (F) You had an unpack template indicating a counted-length string, which
2153 must be followed by one of the letters a, A or Z to indicate what sort
2154 of string is to be unpacked. See L<perlfunc/pack>.
2156 =item / must follow a numeric type
2158 (F) You had an unpack template that contained a '#', but this did not
2159 follow some numeric unpack specification. See L<perlfunc/pack>.
2161 =item "my sub" not yet implemented
2163 (F) Lexically scoped subroutines are not yet implemented. Don't try
2166 =item "my" variable %s can't be in a package
2168 (F) Lexically scoped variables aren't in a package, so it doesn't make
2169 sense to try to declare one with a package qualifier on the front. Use
2170 local() if you want to localize a package variable.
2172 =item Name "%s::%s" used only once: possible typo
2174 (W once) Typographical errors often show up as unique variable names.
2175 If you had a good reason for having a unique name, then just mention it
2176 again somehow to suppress the message. The C<our> declaration is
2177 provided for this purpose.
2179 =item Negative length
2181 (F) You tried to do a read/write/send/recv operation with a buffer
2182 length that is less than 0. This is difficult to imagine.
2184 =item Negative offset to vec in lvalue context
2186 (F) When C<vec> is called in an lvalue context, the second argument must be
2187 greater than or equal to zero.
2189 =item Nested quantifiers in regex; marked by <-- HERE in m/%s/
2191 (F) You can't quantify a quantifier without intervening parentheses. So
2192 things like ** or +* or ?* are illegal. The <-- HERE shows in the regular
2193 expression about where the problem was discovered.
2195 Note that the minimal matching quantifiers, C<*?>, C<+?>, and
2196 C<??> appear to be nested quantifiers, but aren't. See L<perlre>.
2198 =item %s never introduced
2200 (S internal) The symbol in question was declared but somehow went out of
2201 scope before it could possibly have been used.
2203 =item No %s allowed while running setuid
2205 (F) Certain operations are deemed to be too insecure for a setuid or
2206 setgid script to even be allowed to attempt. Generally speaking there
2207 will be another way to do what you want that is, if not secure, at least
2208 securable. See L<perlsec>.
2210 =item No B<-e> allowed in setuid scripts
2212 (F) A setuid script can't be specified by the user.
2214 =item No comma allowed after %s
2216 (F) A list operator that has a filehandle or "indirect object" is not
2217 allowed to have a comma between that and the following arguments.
2218 Otherwise it'd be just another one of the arguments.
2220 One possible cause for this is that you expected to have imported a
2221 constant to your name space with B<use> or B<import> while no such
2222 importing took place, it may for example be that your operating system
2223 does not support that particular constant. Hopefully you did use an
2224 explicit import list for the constants you expect to see, please see
2225 L<perlfunc/use> and L<perlfunc/import>. While an explicit import list
2226 would probably have caught this error earlier it naturally does not
2227 remedy the fact that your operating system still does not support that
2228 constant. Maybe you have a typo in the constants of the symbol import
2229 list of B<use> or B<import> or in the constant name at the line where
2230 this error was triggered?
2232 =item No command into which to pipe on command line
2234 (F) An error peculiar to VMS. Perl handles its own command line
2235 redirection, and found a '|' at the end of the command line, so it
2236 doesn't know where you want to pipe the output from this command.
2238 =item No DB::DB routine defined
2240 (F) The currently executing code was compiled with the B<-d> switch, but
2241 for some reason the perl5db.pl file (or some facsimile thereof) didn't
2242 define a routine to be called at the beginning of each statement. Which
2243 is odd, because the file should have been required automatically, and
2244 should have blown up the require if it didn't parse right.
2246 =item No dbm on this machine
2248 (P) This is counted as an internal error, because every machine should
2249 supply dbm nowadays, because Perl comes with SDBM. See L<SDBM_File>.
2251 =item No DBsub routine
2253 (F) The currently executing code was compiled with the B<-d> switch,
2254 but for some reason the perl5db.pl file (or some facsimile thereof)
2255 didn't define a DB::sub routine to be called at the beginning of each
2256 ordinary subroutine call.
2258 =item No error file after 2> or 2>> on command line
2260 (F) An error peculiar to VMS. Perl handles its own command line
2261 redirection, and found a '2>' or a '2>>' on the command line, but can't
2262 find the name of the file to which to write data destined for stderr.
2264 =item No input file after < on command line
2266 (F) An error peculiar to VMS. Perl handles its own command line
2267 redirection, and found a '<' on the command line, but can't find the
2268 name of the file from which to read data for stdin.
2272 (F) The setuid emulator requires that scripts have a well-formed #! line
2273 even on machines that don't support the #! construct.
2275 =item "no" not allowed in expression
2277 (F) The "no" keyword is recognized and executed at compile time, and
2278 returns no useful value. See L<perlmod>.
2280 =item No output file after > on command line
2282 (F) An error peculiar to VMS. Perl handles its own command line
2283 redirection, and found a lone '>' at the end of the command line, so it
2284 doesn't know where you wanted to redirect stdout.
2286 =item No output file after > or >> on command line
2288 (F) An error peculiar to VMS. Perl handles its own command line
2289 redirection, and found a '>' or a '>>' on the command line, but can't
2290 find the name of the file to which to write data destined for stdout.
2292 =item No package name allowed for variable %s in "our"
2294 (F) Fully qualified variable names are not allowed in "our"
2295 declarations, because that doesn't make much sense under existing
2296 semantics. Such syntax is reserved for future extensions.
2298 =item No Perl script found in input
2300 (F) You called C<perl -x>, but no line was found in the file beginning
2301 with #! and containing the word "perl".
2303 =item No setregid available
2305 (F) Configure didn't find anything resembling the setregid() call for
2308 =item No setreuid available
2310 (F) Configure didn't find anything resembling the setreuid() call for
2313 =item No space allowed after -%c
2315 (F) The argument to the indicated command line switch must follow
2316 immediately after the switch, without intervening spaces.
2318 =item No %s specified for -%c
2320 (F) The indicated command line switch needs a mandatory argument, but
2321 you haven't specified one.
2323 =item No such class %s
2325 (F) You provided a class qualifier in a "my" or "our" declaration, but
2326 this class doesn't exist at this point in your program.
2328 =item No such pipe open
2330 (P) An error peculiar to VMS. The internal routine my_pclose() tried to
2331 close a pipe which hadn't been opened. This should have been caught
2332 earlier as an attempt to close an unopened filehandle.
2334 =item No such pseudo-hash field "%s"
2336 (F) You tried to access an array as a hash, but the field name used is
2337 not defined. The hash at index 0 should map all valid field names to
2338 array indices for that to work.
2340 =item No such pseudo-hash field "%s" in variable %s of type %s
2342 (F) You tried to access a field of a typed variable where the type does
2343 not know about the field name. The field names are looked up in the
2344 %FIELDS hash in the type package at compile time. The %FIELDS hash is
2345 %usually set up with the 'fields' pragma.
2347 =item No such signal: SIG%s
2349 (W signal) You specified a signal name as a subscript to %SIG that was
2350 not recognized. Say C<kill -l> in your shell to see the valid signal
2351 names on your system.
2353 =item Not a CODE reference
2355 (F) Perl was trying to evaluate a reference to a code value (that is, a
2356 subroutine), but found a reference to something else instead. You can
2357 use the ref() function to find out what kind of ref it really was. See
2360 =item Not a format reference
2362 (F) I'm not sure how you managed to generate a reference to an anonymous
2363 format, but this indicates you did, and that it didn't exist.
2365 =item Not a GLOB reference
2367 (F) Perl was trying to evaluate a reference to a "typeglob" (that is, a
2368 symbol table entry that looks like C<*foo>), but found a reference to
2369 something else instead. You can use the ref() function to find out what
2370 kind of ref it really was. See L<perlref>.
2372 =item Not a HASH reference
2374 (F) Perl was trying to evaluate a reference to a hash value, but found a
2375 reference to something else instead. You can use the ref() function to
2376 find out what kind of ref it really was. See L<perlref>.
2378 =item Not an ARRAY reference
2380 (F) Perl was trying to evaluate a reference to an array value, but found
2381 a reference to something else instead. You can use the ref() function
2382 to find out what kind of ref it really was. See L<perlref>.
2384 =item Not a perl script
2386 (F) The setuid emulator requires that scripts have a well-formed #! line
2387 even on machines that don't support the #! construct. The line must
2390 =item Not a SCALAR reference
2392 (F) Perl was trying to evaluate a reference to a scalar value, but found
2393 a reference to something else instead. You can use the ref() function
2394 to find out what kind of ref it really was. See L<perlref>.
2396 =item Not a subroutine reference
2398 (F) Perl was trying to evaluate a reference to a code value (that is, a
2399 subroutine), but found a reference to something else instead. You can
2400 use the ref() function to find out what kind of ref it really was. See
2403 =item Not a subroutine reference in overload table
2405 (F) An attempt was made to specify an entry in an overloading table that
2406 doesn't somehow point to a valid subroutine. See L<overload>.
2408 =item Not enough arguments for %s
2410 (F) The function requires more arguments than you specified.
2412 =item Not enough format arguments
2414 (W syntax) A format specified more picture fields than the next line
2415 supplied. See L<perlform>.
2419 (A) You've accidentally run your script through the Bourne shell instead
2420 of Perl. Check the #! line, or manually feed your script into Perl
2423 =item %s not allowed in length fields
2425 (F) The count in the (un)pack template may be replaced by C<[TEMPLATE]> only if
2426 C<TEMPLATE> always matches the same amount of packed bytes. Redesign
2429 =item no UTC offset information; assuming local time is UTC
2431 (S) A warning peculiar to VMS. Perl was unable to find the local
2432 timezone offset, so it's assuming that local system time is equivalent
2433 to UTC. If it's not, define the logical name
2434 F<SYS$TIMEZONE_DIFFERENTIAL> to translate to the number of seconds which
2435 need to be added to UTC to get local time.
2437 =item Null filename used
2439 (F) You can't require the null filename, especially because on many
2440 machines that means the current directory! See L<perlfunc/require>.
2442 =item NULL OP IN RUN
2444 (P debugging) Some internal routine called run() with a null opcode
2447 =item Null picture in formline
2449 (F) The first argument to formline must be a valid format picture
2450 specification. It was found to be empty, which probably means you
2451 supplied it an uninitialized value. See L<perlform>.
2455 (P) An attempt was made to realloc NULL.
2457 =item NULL regexp argument
2459 (P) The internal pattern matching routines blew it big time.
2461 =item NULL regexp parameter
2463 (P) The internal pattern matching routines are out of their gourd.
2465 =item Number too long
2467 (F) Perl limits the representation of decimal numbers in programs to
2468 about 250 characters. You've exceeded that length. Future
2469 versions of Perl are likely to eliminate this arbitrary limitation. In
2470 the meantime, try using scientific notation (e.g. "1e6" instead of
2473 =item Octal number in vector unsupported
2475 (F) Numbers with a leading C<0> are not currently allowed in vectors.
2476 The octal number interpretation of such numbers may be supported in a
2479 =item Octal number > 037777777777 non-portable
2481 (W portable) The octal number you specified is larger than 2**32-1
2482 (4294967295) and therefore non-portable between systems. See
2483 L<perlport> for more on portability concerns.
2485 See also L<perlport> for writing portable code.
2487 =item Odd number of arguments for overload::constant
2489 (W overload) The call to overload::constant contained an odd number of
2490 arguments. The arguments should come in pairs.
2492 =item Odd number of elements in anonymous hash
2494 (W misc) You specified an odd number of elements to initialize a hash,
2495 which is odd, because hashes come in key/value pairs.
2497 =item Odd number of elements in hash assignment
2499 (W misc) You specified an odd number of elements to initialize a hash,
2500 which is odd, because hashes come in key/value pairs.
2502 =item Offset outside string
2504 (F) You tried to do a read/write/send/recv operation with an offset
2505 pointing outside the buffer. This is difficult to imagine. The sole
2506 exception to this is that C<sysread()>ing past the buffer will extend
2507 the buffer and zero pad the new area.
2509 =item -%s on unopened filehandle %s
2511 (W unopened) You tried to invoke a file test operator on a filehandle
2512 that isn't open. Check your control flow. See also L<perlfunc/-X>.
2514 =item %s() on unopened %s
2516 (W unopened) An I/O operation was attempted on a filehandle that was
2517 never initialized. You need to do an open(), a sysopen(), or a socket()
2518 call, or call a constructor from the FileHandle package.
2522 (S internal) An internal warning that the grammar is screwed up.
2526 (S internal) An internal warning that the grammar is screwed up.
2528 =item Operation `%s': no method found, %s
2530 (F) An attempt was made to perform an overloaded operation for which no
2531 handler was defined. While some handlers can be autogenerated in terms
2532 of other handlers, there is no default handler for any operation, unless
2533 C<fallback> overloading key is specified to be true. See L<overload>.
2535 =item Operator or semicolon missing before %s
2537 (S ambiguous) You used a variable or subroutine call where the parser
2538 was expecting an operator. The parser has assumed you really meant to
2539 use an operator, but this is highly likely to be incorrect. For
2540 example, if you say "*foo *foo" it will be interpreted as if you said
2543 =item "our" variable %s redeclared
2545 (W misc) You seem to have already declared the same global once before
2546 in the current lexical scope.
2548 =item Out of memory!
2550 (X) The malloc() function returned 0, indicating there was insufficient
2551 remaining memory (or virtual memory) to satisfy the request. Perl has
2552 no option but to exit immediately.
2554 =item Out of memory during "large" request for %s
2556 (F) The malloc() function returned 0, indicating there was insufficient
2557 remaining memory (or virtual memory) to satisfy the request. However,
2558 the request was judged large enough (compile-time default is 64K), so a
2559 possibility to shut down by trapping this error is granted.
2561 =item Out of memory during request for %s
2563 (X|F) The malloc() function returned 0, indicating there was
2564 insufficient remaining memory (or virtual memory) to satisfy the
2567 The request was judged to be small, so the possibility to trap it
2568 depends on the way perl was compiled. By default it is not trappable.
2569 However, if compiled for this, Perl may use the contents of C<$^M> as an
2570 emergency pool after die()ing with this message. In this case the error
2571 is trappable I<once>, and the error message will include the line and file
2572 where the failed request happened.
2574 =item Out of memory during ridiculously large request
2576 (F) You can't allocate more than 2^31+"small amount" bytes. This error
2577 is most likely to be caused by a typo in the Perl program. e.g.,
2578 C<$arr[time]> instead of C<$arr[$time]>.
2580 =item Out of memory for yacc stack
2582 (F) The yacc parser wanted to grow its stack so it could continue
2583 parsing, but realloc() wouldn't give it more memory, virtual or
2586 =item @ outside of string
2588 (F) You had a pack template that specified an absolute position outside
2589 the string being unpacked. See L<perlfunc/pack>.
2591 =item %s package attribute may clash with future reserved word: %s
2593 (W reserved) A lowercase attribute name was used that had a
2594 package-specific handler. That name might have a meaning to Perl itself
2595 some day, even though it doesn't yet. Perhaps you should use a
2596 mixed-case attribute name, instead. See L<attributes>.
2600 (W io) A single call to write() produced more lines than can fit on a
2601 page. See L<perlform>.
2605 (P) An internal error.
2607 =item panic: ck_grep
2609 (P) Failed an internal consistency check trying to compile a grep.
2611 =item panic: ck_split
2613 (P) Failed an internal consistency check trying to compile a split.
2615 =item panic: corrupt saved stack index
2617 (P) The savestack was requested to restore more localized values than
2618 there are in the savestack.
2620 =item panic: del_backref
2622 (P) Failed an internal consistency check while trying to reset a weak
2627 (P) We popped the context stack to an eval context, and then discovered
2628 it wasn't an eval context.
2630 =item panic: pp_match%s
2632 (P) The internal pp_match() routine was called with invalid operational
2635 =item panic: do_subst
2637 (P) The internal pp_subst() routine was called with invalid operational
2640 =item panic: do_trans_%s
2642 (P) The internal do_trans routines were called with invalid operational
2647 (P) The library function frexp() failed, making printf("%f") impossible.
2651 (P) We popped the context stack to a context with the specified label,
2652 and then discovered it wasn't a context we know how to do a goto in.
2654 =item panic: INTERPCASEMOD
2656 (P) The lexer got into a bad state at a case modifier.
2658 =item panic: INTERPCONCAT
2660 (P) The lexer got into a bad state parsing a string with brackets.
2662 =item panic: kid popen errno read
2664 (F) forked child returned an incomprehensible message about its errno.
2668 (P) We popped the context stack to a block context, and then discovered
2669 it wasn't a block context.
2671 =item panic: leave_scope clearsv
2673 (P) A writable lexical variable became read-only somehow within the
2676 =item panic: leave_scope inconsistency
2678 (P) The savestack probably got out of sync. At least, there was an
2679 invalid enum on the top of it.
2681 =item panic: magic_killbackrefs
2683 (P) Failed an internal consistency check while trying to reset all weak
2684 references to an object.
2688 (P) Something requested a negative number of bytes of malloc.
2690 =item panic: mapstart
2692 (P) The compiler is screwed up with respect to the map() function.
2694 =item panic: null array
2696 (P) One of the internal array routines was passed a null AV pointer.
2698 =item panic: pad_alloc
2700 (P) The compiler got confused about which scratch pad it was allocating
2701 and freeing temporaries and lexicals from.
2703 =item panic: pad_free curpad
2705 (P) The compiler got confused about which scratch pad it was allocating
2706 and freeing temporaries and lexicals from.
2708 =item panic: pad_free po
2710 (P) An invalid scratch pad offset was detected internally.
2712 =item panic: pad_reset curpad
2714 (P) The compiler got confused about which scratch pad it was allocating
2715 and freeing temporaries and lexicals from.
2717 =item panic: pad_sv po
2719 (P) An invalid scratch pad offset was detected internally.
2721 =item panic: pad_swipe curpad
2723 (P) The compiler got confused about which scratch pad it was allocating
2724 and freeing temporaries and lexicals from.
2726 =item panic: pad_swipe po
2728 (P) An invalid scratch pad offset was detected internally.
2730 =item panic: pp_iter
2732 (P) The foreach iterator got called in a non-loop context frame.
2734 =item panic: pp_split
2736 (P) Something terrible went wrong in setting up for the split.
2738 =item panic: realloc
2740 (P) Something requested a negative number of bytes of realloc.
2742 =item panic: restartop
2744 (P) Some internal routine requested a goto (or something like it), and
2745 didn't supply the destination.
2749 (P) We popped the context stack to a subroutine or eval context, and
2750 then discovered it wasn't a subroutine or eval context.
2752 =item panic: scan_num
2754 (P) scan_num() got called on something that wasn't a number.
2756 =item panic: sv_insert
2758 (P) The sv_insert() routine was told to remove more string than there
2761 =item panic: top_env
2763 (P) The compiler attempted to do a goto, or something weird like that.
2767 (P) The lexer got into a bad state while processing a case modifier.
2769 =item panic: utf16_to_utf8: odd bytelen
2771 (P) Something tried to call utf16_to_utf8 with an odd (as opposed
2772 to even) byte length.
2774 =item Parentheses missing around "%s" list
2776 (W parenthesis) You said something like
2782 my ($foo, $bar) = @_;
2784 Remember that "my", "our", and "local" bind tighter than comma.
2786 =item Perl %s required--this is only version %s, stopped
2788 (F) The module in question uses features of a version of Perl more
2789 recent than the currently running version. How long has it been since
2790 you upgraded, anyway? See L<perlfunc/require>.
2792 =item PERL_SH_DIR too long
2794 (F) An error peculiar to OS/2. PERL_SH_DIR is the directory to find the
2795 C<sh>-shell in. See "PERL_SH_DIR" in L<perlos2>.
2797 =item perl: warning: Setting locale failed.
2799 (S) The whole warning message will look something like:
2801 perl: warning: Setting locale failed.
2802 perl: warning: Please check that your locale settings:
2805 are supported and installed on your system.
2806 perl: warning: Falling back to the standard locale ("C").
2808 Exactly what were the failed locale settings varies. In the above the
2809 settings were that the LC_ALL was "En_US" and the LANG had no value.
2810 This error means that Perl detected that you and/or your operating
2811 system supplier and/or system administrator have set up the so-called
2812 locale system but Perl could not use those settings. This was not
2813 dead serious, fortunately: there is a "default locale" called "C" that
2814 Perl can and will use, the script will be run. Before you really fix
2815 the problem, however, you will get the same error message each time
2816 you run Perl. How to really fix the problem can be found in
2817 L<perllocale> section B<LOCALE PROBLEMS>.
2819 =item perlio: argument list not closed for layer "%s"
2821 (W layer) When pushing a layer with arguments onto the Perl I/O system you
2822 forgot the ) that closes the argument list. (Layers take care of transforming
2823 data between external and internal representations.) Perl stopped parsing
2824 the layer list at this point and did not attempt to push this layer.
2825 If your program didn't explicitly request the failing operation, it may be
2826 the result of the value of the environment variable PERLIO.
2828 =item perlio: invalid separator character %s in layer specification list %s
2830 (W layer) When pushing layers onto the Perl I/O system, something other than a
2831 colon or whitespace was seen between the elements of a layer list.
2832 If the previous attribute had a parenthesised parameter list, perhaps that
2833 list was terminated too soon.
2835 =item perlio: unknown layer "%s"
2837 (W layer) An attempt was made to push an unknown layer onto the Perl I/O
2838 system. (Layers take care of transforming data between external and
2839 internal representations.) Note that some layers, such as C<mmap>,
2840 are not supported in all environments. If your program didn't
2841 explicitly request the failing operation, it may be the result of the
2842 value of the environment variable PERLIO.
2844 =item Permission denied
2846 (F) The setuid emulator in suidperl decided you were up to no good.
2848 =item pid %x not a child
2850 (W exec) A warning peculiar to VMS. Waitpid() was asked to wait for a
2851 process which isn't a subprocess of the current process. While this is
2852 fine from VMS' perspective, it's probably not what you intended.
2854 =item P must have an explicit size
2856 (F) The unpack format P must have an explicit size, not "*".
2858 =item POSIX syntax [%s] belongs inside character classes in regex;
2860 marked by <-- HERE in m/%s/
2862 (W regexp) The character class constructs [: :], [= =], and [. .] go
2863 I<inside> character classes, the [] are part of the construct, for example:
2864 /[012[:alpha:]345]/. Note that [= =] and [. .] are not currently
2865 implemented; they are simply placeholders for future extensions and will
2866 cause fatal errors. The <-- HERE shows in the regular expression about
2867 where the problem was discovered. See L<perlre>.
2869 =item POSIX syntax [. .] is reserved for future extensions in regex;
2871 marked by <-- HERE in m/%s/
2873 (F regexp) Within regular expression character classes ([]) the syntax
2874 beginning with "[." and ending with ".]" is reserved for future extensions.
2875 If you need to represent those character sequences inside a regular
2876 expression character class, just quote the square brackets with the
2877 backslash: "\[." and ".\]". The <-- HERE shows in the regular expression
2878 about where the problem was discovered. See L<perlre>.
2880 =item POSIX syntax [= =] is reserved for future extensions in regex;
2882 marked by <-- HERE in m/%s/
2884 (F) Within regular expression character classes ([]) the syntax beginning
2885 with "[=" and ending with "=]" is reserved for future extensions. If you
2886 need to represent those character sequences inside a regular expression
2887 character class, just quote the square brackets with the backslash: "\[="
2888 and "=\]". The <-- HERE shows in the regular expression about where the
2889 problem was discovered. See L<perlre>.
2891 =item POSIX class [:%s:] unknown in regex;
2893 marked by <-- HERE in m/%s/
2895 (F) The class in the character class [: :] syntax is unknown. The <-- HERE
2896 shows in the regular expression about where the problem was discovered.
2897 Note that the POSIX character classes do B<not> have the C<is> prefix
2898 the corresponding C interfaces have: in other words, it's C<[[:print:]]>,
2899 not C<isprint>. See L<perlre>.
2901 =item POSIX getpgrp can't take an argument
2903 (F) Your system has POSIX getpgrp(), which takes no argument, unlike
2904 the BSD version, which takes a pid.
2906 =item Possible attempt to put comments in qw() list
2908 (W qw) qw() lists contain items separated by whitespace; as with literal
2909 strings, comment characters are not ignored, but are instead treated as
2910 literal data. (You may have used different delimiters than the
2911 parentheses shown here; braces are also frequently used.)
2913 You probably wrote something like this:
2920 when you should have written this:
2927 If you really want comments, build your list the
2928 old-fashioned way, with quotes and commas:
2932 'b', # another comment
2935 =item Possible attempt to separate words with commas
2937 (W qw) qw() lists contain items separated by whitespace; therefore
2938 commas aren't needed to separate the items. (You may have used
2939 different delimiters than the parentheses shown here; braces are also
2942 You probably wrote something like this:
2946 which puts literal commas into some of the list items. Write it without
2947 commas if you don't want them to appear in your data:
2951 =item Possible memory corruption: %s overflowed 3rd argument
2953 (F) An ioctl() or fcntl() returned more than Perl was bargaining for.
2954 Perl guesses a reasonable buffer size, but puts a sentinel byte at the
2955 end of the buffer just in case. This sentinel byte got clobbered, and
2956 Perl assumes that memory is now corrupted. See L<perlfunc/ioctl>.
2958 =item Possible unintended interpolation of %s in string
2960 (W ambiguous) You said something like `@foo' in a double-quoted string
2961 but there was no array C<@foo> in scope at the time. If you wanted a
2962 literal @foo, then write it as \@foo; otherwise find out what happened
2963 to the array you apparently lost track of.
2965 =item Possible Y2K bug: %s
2967 (W y2k) You are concatenating the number 19 with another number, which
2968 could be a potential Year 2000 problem.
2970 =item pragma "attrs" is deprecated, use "sub NAME : ATTRS" instead
2972 (D deprecated) You have written something like this:
2976 use attrs qw(locked);
2979 You should use the new declaration syntax instead.
2985 The C<use attrs> pragma is now obsolete, and is only provided for
2986 backward-compatibility. See L<perlsub/"Subroutine Attributes">.
2988 =item Precedence problem: open %s should be open(%s)
2990 (S precedence) The old irregular construct
2994 is now misinterpreted as
2998 because of the strict regularization of Perl 5's grammar into unary and
2999 list operators. (The old open was a little of both.) You must put
3000 parentheses around the filehandle, or use the new "or" operator instead
3003 =item Premature end of script headers
3007 =item printf() on closed filehandle %s
3009 (W closed) The filehandle you're writing to got itself closed sometime
3010 before now. Check your control flow.
3012 =item print() on closed filehandle %s
3014 (W closed) The filehandle you're printing on got itself closed sometime
3015 before now. Check your control flow.
3017 =item Process terminated by SIG%s
3019 (W) This is a standard message issued by OS/2 applications, while *nix
3020 applications die in silence. It is considered a feature of the OS/2
3021 port. One can easily disable this by appropriate sighandlers, see
3022 L<perlipc/"Signals">. See also "Process terminated by SIGTERM/SIGINT"
3025 =item Prototype mismatch: %s vs %s
3027 (S prototype) The subroutine being declared or defined had previously been
3028 declared or defined with a different function prototype.
3030 =item Prototype not terminated
3032 (F) You've omitted the closing parenthesis in a function prototype
3035 =item Quantifier in {,} bigger than %d in regex;
3037 marked by <-- HERE in m/%s/
3039 (F) There is currently a limit to the size of the min and max values of the
3040 {min,max} construct. The <-- HERE shows in the regular expression about where
3041 the problem was discovered. See L<perlre>.
3043 =item Quantifier unexpected on zero-length expression;
3045 marked by <-- HERE in m/%s/
3047 (W regexp) You applied a regular expression quantifier in a place where
3048 it makes no sense, such as on a zero-width assertion. Try putting the
3049 quantifier inside the assertion instead. For example, the way to match
3050 "abc" provided that it is followed by three repetitions of "xyz" is
3051 C</abc(?=(?:xyz){3})/>, not C</abc(?=xyz){3}/>.
3053 The <-- HERE shows in the regular expression about where the problem was
3056 =item Range iterator outside integer range
3058 (F) One (or both) of the numeric arguments to the range operator ".."
3059 are outside the range which can be represented by integers internally.
3060 One possible workaround is to force Perl to use magical string increment
3061 by prepending "0" to your numbers.
3063 =item readline() on closed filehandle %s
3065 (W closed) The filehandle you're reading from got itself closed sometime
3066 before now. Check your control flow.
3068 =item Reallocation too large: %lx
3070 (F) You can't allocate more than 64K on an MS-DOS machine.
3072 =item realloc() of freed memory ignored
3074 (S malloc) An internal routine called realloc() on something that had
3077 =item Recompile perl with B<-D>DEBUGGING to use B<-D> switch
3079 (F debugging) You can't use the B<-D> option unless the code to produce
3080 the desired output is compiled into Perl, which entails some overhead,
3081 which is why it's currently left out of your copy.
3083 =item Recursive inheritance detected in package '%s'
3085 (F) More than 100 levels of inheritance were used. Probably indicates
3086 an unintended loop in your inheritance hierarchy.
3088 =item Recursive inheritance detected while looking for method %s
3090 (F) More than 100 levels of inheritance were encountered while invoking
3091 a method. Probably indicates an unintended loop in your inheritance
3094 =item Reference found where even-sized list expected
3096 (W misc) You gave a single reference where Perl was expecting a list
3097 with an even number of elements (for assignment to a hash). This usually
3098 means that you used the anon hash constructor when you meant to use
3099 parens. In any case, a hash requires key/value B<pairs>.
3101 %hash = { one => 1, two => 2, }; # WRONG
3102 %hash = [ qw/ an anon array / ]; # WRONG
3103 %hash = ( one => 1, two => 2, ); # right
3104 %hash = qw( one 1 two 2 ); # also fine
3106 =item Reference is already weak
3108 (W misc) You have attempted to weaken a reference that is already weak.
3109 Doing so has no effect.
3111 =item Reference miscount in sv_replace()
3113 (W internal) The internal sv_replace() function was handed a new SV with
3114 a reference count of other than 1.
3116 =item Reference to nonexistent group in regex;
3118 marked by <-- HERE in m/%s/
3120 (F) You used something like C<\7> in your regular expression, but there are
3121 not at least seven sets of capturing parentheses in the expression. If you
3122 wanted to have the character with value 7 inserted into the regular expression,
3123 prepend a zero to make the number at least two digits: C<\07>
3125 The <-- HERE shows in the regular expression about where the problem was
3128 =item regexp memory corruption
3130 (P) The regular expression engine got confused by what the regular
3131 expression compiler gave it.
3133 =item Regexp out of space
3135 (P) A "can't happen" error, because safemalloc() should have caught it
3138 =item Repeat count in pack overflows
3140 (F) You can't specify a repeat count so large that it overflows your
3141 signed integers. See L<perlfunc/pack>.
3143 =item Repeat count in unpack overflows
3145 (F) You can't specify a repeat count so large that it overflows your
3146 signed integers. See L<perlfunc/unpack>.
3148 =item Reversed %s= operator
3150 (W syntax) You wrote your assignment operator backwards. The = must
3151 always comes last, to avoid ambiguity with subsequent unary operators.
3153 =item Runaway format
3155 (F) Your format contained the ~~ repeat-until-blank sequence, but it
3156 produced 200 lines at once, and the 200th line looked exactly like the
3157 199th line. Apparently you didn't arrange for the arguments to exhaust
3158 themselves, either by using ^ instead of @ (for scalar variables), or by
3159 shifting or popping (for array variables). See L<perlform>.
3161 =item Scalar value @%s[%s] better written as $%s[%s]
3163 (W syntax) You've used an array slice (indicated by @) to select a
3164 single element of an array. Generally it's better to ask for a scalar
3165 value (indicated by $). The difference is that C<$foo[&bar]> always
3166 behaves like a scalar, both when assigning to it and when evaluating its
3167 argument, while C<@foo[&bar]> behaves like a list when you assign to it,
3168 and provides a list context to its subscript, which can do weird things
3169 if you're expecting only one subscript.
3171 On the other hand, if you were actually hoping to treat the array
3172 element as a list, you need to look into how references work, because
3173 Perl will not magically convert between scalars and lists for you. See
3176 =item Scalar value @%s{%s} better written as $%s{%s}
3178 (W syntax) You've used a hash slice (indicated by @) to select a single
3179 element of a hash. Generally it's better to ask for a scalar value
3180 (indicated by $). The difference is that C<$foo{&bar}> always behaves
3181 like a scalar, both when assigning to it and when evaluating its
3182 argument, while C<@foo{&bar}> behaves like a list when you assign to it,
3183 and provides a list context to its subscript, which can do weird things
3184 if you're expecting only one subscript.
3186 On the other hand, if you were actually hoping to treat the hash element
3187 as a list, you need to look into how references work, because Perl will
3188 not magically convert between scalars and lists for you. See
3191 =item Scalars leaked: %d
3193 (P) Something went wrong in Perl's internal bookkeeping of scalars:
3194 not all scalar variables were deallocated by the time Perl exited.
3195 What this usually indicates is a memory leak, which is of course bad,
3196 especially if the Perl program is intended to be long-running.
3198 =item Script is not setuid/setgid in suidperl
3200 (F) Oddly, the suidperl program was invoked on a script without a setuid
3201 or setgid bit set. This doesn't make much sense.
3203 =item Search pattern not terminated
3205 (F) The lexer couldn't find the final delimiter of a // or m{}
3206 construct. Remember that bracketing delimiters count nesting level.
3207 Missing the leading C<$> from a variable C<$m> may cause this error.
3209 =item %sseek() on unopened filehandle
3211 (W unopened) You tried to use the seek() or sysseek() function on a
3212 filehandle that was either never opened or has since been closed.
3214 =item select not implemented
3216 (F) This machine doesn't implement the select() system call.
3218 =item Self-ties of arrays and hashes are not supported
3220 (F) Self-ties are of arrays and hashes are not supported in
3221 the current implementation.
3223 =item Semicolon seems to be missing
3225 (W semicolon) A nearby syntax error was probably caused by a missing
3226 semicolon, or possibly some other missing operator, such as a comma.
3228 =item semi-panic: attempt to dup freed string
3230 (S internal) The internal newSVsv() routine was called to duplicate a
3231 scalar that had previously been marked as free.
3233 =item sem%s not implemented
3235 (F) You don't have System V semaphore IPC on your system.
3237 =item send() on closed socket %s
3239 (W closed) The socket you're sending to got itself closed sometime
3240 before now. Check your control flow.
3242 =item Sequence (? incomplete in regex; marked by <-- HERE in m/%s/
3244 (F) A regular expression ended with an incomplete extension (?. The <-- HERE
3245 shows in the regular expression about where the problem was discovered. See
3248 =item Sequence (?{...}) not terminated or not {}-balanced in regex;
3250 marked by <-- HERE in m/%s/
3252 (F) If the contents of a (?{...}) clause contains braces, they must balance
3253 for Perl to properly detect the end of the clause. The <-- HERE shows in
3254 the regular expression about where the problem was discovered. See
3257 =item Sequence (?%s...) not implemented in regex;
3259 marked by <-- HERE in m/%s/
3261 (F) A proposed regular expression extension has the character reserved but
3262 has not yet been written. The <-- HERE shows in the regular expression about
3263 where the problem was discovered. See L<perlre>.
3265 =item Sequence (?%s...) not recognized in regex;
3267 marked by <-- HERE in m/%s/
3269 (F) You used a regular expression extension that doesn't make sense. The
3270 <-- HERE shows in the regular expression about where the problem was
3271 discovered. See L<perlre>.
3273 =item Sequence (?#... not terminated in regex;
3275 marked by <-- HERE in m/%s/
3277 (F) A regular expression comment must be terminated by a closing
3278 parenthesis. Embedded parentheses aren't allowed. The <-- HERE shows in
3279 the regular expression about where the problem was discovered. See
3282 =item 500 Server error
3288 This is the error message generally seen in a browser window when trying
3289 to run a CGI program (including SSI) over the web. The actual error text
3290 varies widely from server to server. The most frequently-seen variants
3291 are "500 Server error", "Method (something) not permitted", "Document
3292 contains no data", "Premature end of script headers", and "Did not
3293 produce a valid header".
3295 B<This is a CGI error, not a Perl error>.
3297 You need to make sure your script is executable, is accessible by the
3298 user CGI is running the script under (which is probably not the user
3299 account you tested it under), does not rely on any environment variables
3300 (like PATH) from the user it isn't running under, and isn't in a
3301 location where the CGI server can't find it, basically, more or less.
3302 Please see the following for more information:
3304 http://www.perl.org/CGI_MetaFAQ.html
3305 http://www.htmlhelp.org/faq/cgifaq.html
3306 http://www.w3.org/Security/Faq/
3308 You should also look at L<perlfaq9>.
3310 =item setegid() not implemented
3312 (F) You tried to assign to C<$)>, and your operating system doesn't
3313 support the setegid() system call (or equivalent), or at least Configure
3316 =item seteuid() not implemented
3318 (F) You tried to assign to C<< $> >>, and your operating system doesn't
3319 support the seteuid() system call (or equivalent), or at least Configure
3322 =item setpgrp can't take arguments
3324 (F) Your system has the setpgrp() from BSD 4.2, which takes no
3325 arguments, unlike POSIX setpgid(), which takes a process ID and process
3328 =item setrgid() not implemented
3330 (F) You tried to assign to C<$(>, and your operating system doesn't
3331 support the setrgid() system call (or equivalent), or at least Configure
3334 =item setruid() not implemented
3336 (F) You tried to assign to C<$<>, and your operating system doesn't
3337 support the setruid() system call (or equivalent), or at least Configure
3340 =item setsockopt() on closed socket %s
3342 (W closed) You tried to set a socket option on a closed socket. Did you
3343 forget to check the return value of your socket() call? See
3344 L<perlfunc/setsockopt>.
3346 =item Setuid/gid script is writable by world
3348 (F) The setuid emulator won't run a script that is writable by the
3349 world, because the world might have written on it already.
3351 =item shm%s not implemented
3353 (F) You don't have System V shared memory IPC on your system.
3355 =item <> should be quotes
3357 (F) You wrote C<< require <file> >> when you should have written
3360 =item /%s/ should probably be written as "%s"
3362 (W syntax) You have used a pattern where Perl expected to find a string,
3363 as in the first argument to C<join>. Perl will treat the true or false
3364 result of matching the pattern against $_ as the string, which is
3365 probably not what you had in mind.
3367 =item shutdown() on closed socket %s
3369 (W closed) You tried to do a shutdown on a closed socket. Seems a bit
3372 =item SIG%s handler "%s" not defined
3374 (W signal) The signal handler named in %SIG doesn't, in fact, exist.
3375 Perhaps you put it into the wrong package?
3377 =item sort is now a reserved word
3379 (F) An ancient error message that almost nobody ever runs into anymore.
3380 But before sort was a keyword, people sometimes used it as a filehandle.
3382 =item Sort subroutine didn't return a numeric value
3384 (F) A sort comparison routine must return a number. You probably blew
3385 it by not using C<< <=> >> or C<cmp>, or by not using them correctly.
3386 See L<perlfunc/sort>.
3388 =item Sort subroutine didn't return single value
3390 (F) A sort comparison subroutine may not return a list value with more
3391 or less than one element. See L<perlfunc/sort>.
3393 =item splice() offset past end of array
3395 (W misc) You attempted to specify an offset that was past the end of
3396 the array passed to splice(). Splicing will instead commence at the end
3397 of the array, rather than past it. If this isn't what you want, try
3398 explicitly pre-extending the array by assigning $#array = $offset. See
3403 (P) The split was looping infinitely. (Obviously, a split shouldn't
3404 iterate more times than there are characters of input, which is what
3405 happened.) See L<perlfunc/split>.
3407 =item Statement unlikely to be reached
3409 (W exec) You did an exec() with some statement after it other than a
3410 die(). This is almost always an error, because exec() never returns
3411 unless there was a failure. You probably wanted to use system()
3412 instead, which does return. To suppress this warning, put the exec() in
3415 =item stat() on unopened filehandle %s
3417 (W unopened) You tried to use the stat() function on a filehandle that
3418 was either never opened or has since been closed.
3420 =item Stub found while resolving method `%s' overloading %s
3422 (P) Overloading resolution over @ISA tree may be broken by importation
3423 stubs. Stubs should never be implicitly created, but explicit calls to
3424 C<can> may break this.
3426 =item Subroutine %s redefined
3428 (W redefine) You redefined a subroutine. To suppress this warning, say
3431 no warnings 'redefine';
3432 eval "sub name { ... }";
3435 =item Substitution loop
3437 (P) The substitution was looping infinitely. (Obviously, a substitution
3438 shouldn't iterate more times than there are characters of input, which
3439 is what happened.) See the discussion of substitution in
3440 L<perlop/"Quote and Quote-like Operators">.
3442 =item Substitution pattern not terminated
3444 (F) The lexer couldn't find the interior delimiter of an s/// or s{}{}
3445 construct. Remember that bracketing delimiters count nesting level.
3446 Missing the leading C<$> from variable C<$s> may cause this error.
3448 =item Substitution replacement not terminated
3450 (F) The lexer couldn't find the final delimiter of an s/// or s{}{}
3451 construct. Remember that bracketing delimiters count nesting level.
3452 Missing the leading C<$> from variable C<$s> may cause this error.
3454 =item substr outside of string
3456 (W substr),(F) You tried to reference a substr() that pointed outside of
3457 a string. That is, the absolute value of the offset was larger than the
3458 length of the string. See L<perlfunc/substr>. This warning is fatal if
3459 substr is used in an lvalue context (as the left hand side of an
3460 assignment or as a subroutine argument for example).
3462 =item suidperl is no longer needed since %s
3464 (F) Your Perl was compiled with B<-D>SETUID_SCRIPTS_ARE_SECURE_NOW, but
3465 a version of the setuid emulator somehow got run anyway.
3467 =item Switch (?(condition)... contains too many branches in regex;
3469 marked by <-- HERE in m/%s/
3471 (F) A (?(condition)if-clause|else-clause) construct can have at most two
3472 branches (the if-clause and the else-clause). If you want one or both to
3473 contain alternation, such as using C<this|that|other>, enclose it in
3474 clustering parentheses:
3476 (?(condition)(?:this|that|other)|else-clause)
3478 The <-- HERE shows in the regular expression about where the problem was
3479 discovered. See L<perlre>.
3481 =item Switch condition not recognized in regex;
3483 marked by <-- HERE in m/%s/
3485 (F) If the argument to the (?(...)if-clause|else-clause) construct is a
3486 number, it can be only a number. The <-- HERE shows in the regular expression
3487 about where the problem was discovered. See L<perlre>.
3489 =item switching effective %s is not implemented
3491 (F) While under the C<use filetest> pragma, we cannot switch the real
3492 and effective uids or gids.
3496 (F) Probably means you had a syntax error. Common reasons include:
3498 A keyword is misspelled.
3499 A semicolon is missing.
3501 An opening or closing parenthesis is missing.
3502 An opening or closing brace is missing.
3503 A closing quote is missing.
3505 Often there will be another error message associated with the syntax
3506 error giving more information. (Sometimes it helps to turn on B<-w>.)
3507 The error message itself often tells you where it was in the line when
3508 it decided to give up. Sometimes the actual error is several tokens
3509 before this, because Perl is good at understanding random input.
3510 Occasionally the line number may be misleading, and once in a blue moon
3511 the only way to figure out what's triggering the error is to call
3512 C<perl -c> repeatedly, chopping away half the program each time to see
3513 if the error went away. Sort of the cybernetic version of S<20
3516 =item syntax error at line %d: `%s' unexpected
3518 (A) You've accidentally run your script through the Bourne shell instead
3519 of Perl. Check the #! line, or manually feed your script into Perl
3522 =item syntax error in file %s at line %d, next 2 tokens "%s"
3524 (F) This error is likely to occur if you run a perl5 script through
3525 a perl4 interpreter, especially if the next 2 tokens are "use strict"
3526 or "my $var" or "our $var".
3530 (F) The final summary message when a C<perl -c> succeeds.
3532 =item System V %s is not implemented on this machine
3534 (F) You tried to do something with a function beginning with "sem",
3535 "shm", or "msg" but that System V IPC is not implemented in your
3536 machine. In some machines the functionality can exist but be
3537 unconfigured. Consult your system support.
3539 =item syswrite() on closed filehandle %s
3541 (W closed) The filehandle you're writing to got itself closed sometime
3542 before now. Check your control flow.
3544 =item Target of goto is too deeply nested
3546 (F) You tried to use C<goto> to reach a label that was too deeply nested
3547 for Perl to reach. Perl is doing you a favor by refusing.
3549 =item tell() on unopened filehandle
3551 (W unopened) You tried to use the tell() function on a filehandle that
3552 was either never opened or has since been closed.
3554 =item That use of $[ is unsupported
3556 (F) Assignment to C<$[> is now strictly circumscribed, and interpreted
3557 as a compiler directive. You may say only one of
3566 This is to prevent the problem of one module changing the array base out
3567 from under another module inadvertently. See L<perlvar/$[>.
3569 =item The crypt() function is unimplemented due to excessive paranoia
3571 (F) Configure couldn't find the crypt() function on your machine,
3572 probably because your vendor didn't supply it, probably because they
3573 think the U.S. Government thinks it's a secret, or at least that they
3574 will continue to pretend that it is. And if you quote me on that, I
3577 =item The %s function is unimplemented
3579 The function indicated isn't implemented on this architecture, according
3580 to the probings of Configure.
3582 =item The stat preceding %s wasn't an lstat
3584 (F) It makes no sense to test the current stat buffer for symbolic
3585 linkhood if the last stat that wrote to the stat buffer already went
3586 past the symlink to get to the real file. Use an actual filename
3589 =item This Perl can't reset CRTL environ elements (%s)
3591 =item This Perl can't set CRTL environ elements (%s=%s)
3593 (W internal) Warnings peculiar to VMS. You tried to change or delete an
3594 element of the CRTL's internal environ array, but your copy of Perl
3595 wasn't built with a CRTL that contained the setenv() function. You'll
3596 need to rebuild Perl with a CRTL that does, or redefine
3597 F<PERL_ENV_TABLES> (see L<perlvms>) so that the environ array isn't the
3598 target of the change to
3599 %ENV which produced the warning.
3601 =item thread failed to start: %s
3603 (F) The entry point function of threads->create() failed for some reason.
3605 =item times not implemented
3607 (F) Your version of the C library apparently doesn't do times(). I
3608 suspect you're not running on Unix.
3610 =item Too few args to syscall
3612 (F) There has to be at least one argument to syscall() to specify the
3613 system call to call, silly dilly.
3615 =item Too late for "B<-T>" option
3617 (X) The #! line (or local equivalent) in a Perl script contains the
3618 B<-T> option, but Perl was not invoked with B<-T> in its command line.
3619 This is an error because, by the time Perl discovers a B<-T> in a
3620 script, it's too late to properly taint everything from the environment.
3623 If the Perl script is being executed as a command using the #!
3624 mechanism (or its local equivalent), this error can usually be fixed by
3625 editing the #! line so that the B<-T> option is a part of Perl's first
3626 argument: e.g. change C<perl -n -T> to C<perl -T -n>.
3628 If the Perl script is being executed as C<perl scriptname>, then the
3629 B<-T> option must appear on the command line: C<perl -T scriptname>.
3631 =item Too late for "-%s" option
3633 (X) The #! line (or local equivalent) in a Perl script contains the
3634 B<-M> or B<-m> option. This is an error because B<-M> and B<-m> options
3635 are not intended for use inside scripts. Use the C<use> pragma instead.
3637 =item Too late to run %s block
3639 (W void) A CHECK or INIT block is being defined during run time proper,
3640 when the opportunity to run them has already passed. Perhaps you are
3641 loading a file with C<require> or C<do> when you should be using C<use>
3642 instead. Or perhaps you should put the C<require> or C<do> inside a
3645 =item Too many args to syscall
3647 (F) Perl supports a maximum of only 14 args to syscall().
3649 =item Too many arguments for %s
3651 (F) The function requires fewer arguments than you specified.
3657 (A) You've accidentally run your script through B<csh> instead of Perl.
3658 Check the #! line, or manually feed your script into Perl yourself.
3660 =item Trailing \ in regex m/%s/
3662 (F) The regular expression ends with an unbackslashed backslash.
3663 Backslash it. See L<perlre>.
3665 =item Transliteration pattern not terminated
3667 (F) The lexer couldn't find the interior delimiter of a tr/// or tr[][]
3668 or y/// or y[][] construct. Missing the leading C<$> from variables
3669 C<$tr> or C<$y> may cause this error.
3671 =item Transliteration replacement not terminated
3673 (F) The lexer couldn't find the final delimiter of a tr/// or tr[][]
3676 =item truncate not implemented
3678 (F) Your machine doesn't implement a file truncation mechanism that
3679 Configure knows about.
3681 =item Type of arg %d to %s must be %s (not %s)
3683 (F) This function requires the argument in that position to be of a
3684 certain type. Arrays must be @NAME or C<@{EXPR}>. Hashes must be
3685 %NAME or C<%{EXPR}>. No implicit dereferencing is allowed--use the
3686 {EXPR} forms as an explicit dereference. See L<perlref>.
3688 =item umask not implemented
3690 (F) Your machine doesn't implement the umask function and you tried to
3691 use it to restrict permissions for yourself (EXPR & 0700).
3693 =item Unable to create sub named "%s"
3695 (F) You attempted to create or access a subroutine with an illegal name.
3697 =item Unbalanced context: %d more PUSHes than POPs
3699 (W internal) The exit code detected an internal inconsistency in how
3700 many execution contexts were entered and left.
3702 =item Unbalanced saves: %d more saves than restores
3704 (W internal) The exit code detected an internal inconsistency in how
3705 many values were temporarily localized.
3707 =item Unbalanced scopes: %d more ENTERs than LEAVEs
3709 (W internal) The exit code detected an internal inconsistency in how
3710 many blocks were entered and left.
3712 =item Unbalanced tmps: %d more allocs than frees
3714 (W internal) The exit code detected an internal inconsistency in how
3715 many mortal scalars were allocated and freed.
3717 =item Undefined format "%s" called
3719 (F) The format indicated doesn't seem to exist. Perhaps it's really in
3720 another package? See L<perlform>.
3722 =item Undefined sort subroutine "%s" called
3724 (F) The sort comparison routine specified doesn't seem to exist.
3725 Perhaps it's in a different package? See L<perlfunc/sort>.
3727 =item Undefined subroutine &%s called
3729 (F) The subroutine indicated hasn't been defined, or if it was, it has
3730 since been undefined.
3732 =item Undefined subroutine called
3734 (F) The anonymous subroutine you're trying to call hasn't been defined,
3735 or if it was, it has since been undefined.
3737 =item Undefined subroutine in sort
3739 (F) The sort comparison routine specified is declared but doesn't seem
3740 to have been defined yet. See L<perlfunc/sort>.
3742 =item Undefined top format "%s" called
3744 (F) The format indicated doesn't seem to exist. Perhaps it's really in
3745 another package? See L<perlform>.
3747 =item Undefined value assigned to typeglob
3749 (W misc) An undefined value was assigned to a typeglob, a la
3750 C<*foo = undef>. This does nothing. It's possible that you really mean
3753 =item %s: Undefined variable
3755 (A) You've accidentally run your script through B<csh> instead of Perl.
3756 Check the #! line, or manually feed your script into Perl yourself.
3758 =item unexec of %s into %s failed!
3760 (F) The unexec() routine failed for some reason. See your local FSF
3761 representative, who probably put it there in the first place.
3763 =item Unicode character %s is illegal
3765 (W utf8) Certain Unicode characters have been designated off-limits by
3766 the Unicode standard and should not be generated. If you really know
3767 what you are doing you can turn off this warning by C<no warnings 'utf8';>.
3769 =item Unknown BYTEORDER
3771 (F) There are no byte-swapping functions for a machine with this byte
3774 =item Unknown "re" subpragma '%s' (known ones are: %s)
3776 You tried to use an unknown subpragma of the "re" pragma.
3778 =item Unknown switch condition (?(%.2s in regex;
3780 marked by <-- HERE in m/%s/
3782 (F) The condition part of a (?(condition)if-clause|else-clause) construct
3783 is not known. The condition may be lookahead or lookbehind (the condition
3784 is true if the lookahead or lookbehind is true), a (?{...}) construct (the
3785 condition is true if the code evaluates to a true value), or a number (the
3786 condition is true if the set of capturing parentheses named by the number
3789 The <-- HERE shows in the regular expression about where the problem was
3790 discovered. See L<perlre>.
3792 =item Unknown open() mode '%s'
3794 (F) The second argument of 3-argument open() is not among the list
3795 of valid modes: C<< < >>, C<< > >>, C<<< >> >>>, C<< +< >>,
3796 C<< +> >>, C<<< +>> >>>, C<-|>, C<|->, C<< <& >>, C<< >& >>.
3798 =item Unknown process %x sent message to prime_env_iter: %s
3800 (P) An error peculiar to VMS. Perl was reading values for %ENV before
3801 iterating over it, and someone else stuck a message in the stream of
3802 data Perl expected. Someone's very confused, or perhaps trying to
3803 subvert Perl's population of %ENV for nefarious purposes.
3805 =item Unknown warnings category '%s'
3807 (F) An error issued by the C<warnings> pragma. You specified a warnings
3808 category that is unknown to perl at this point.
3810 Note that if you want to enable a warnings category registered by a module
3811 (e.g. C<use warnings 'File::Find'>), you must have imported this module
3814 =item unmatched [ in regex; marked by <-- HERE in m/%s/
3816 (F) The brackets around a character class must match. If you wish to
3817 include a closing bracket in a character class, backslash it or put it
3818 first. The <-- HERE shows in the regular expression about where the problem
3819 was discovered. See L<perlre>.
3821 =item unmatched ( in regex; marked by <-- HERE in m/%s/
3823 (F) Unbackslashed parentheses must always be balanced in regular
3824 expressions. If you're a vi user, the % key is valuable for finding the
3825 matching parenthesis. The <-- HERE shows in the regular expression about
3826 where the problem was discovered. See L<perlre>.
3828 =item Unmatched right %s bracket
3830 (F) The lexer counted more closing curly or square brackets than opening
3831 ones, so you're probably missing a matching opening bracket. As a
3832 general rule, you'll find the missing one (so to speak) near the place
3833 you were last editing.
3835 =item Unquoted string "%s" may clash with future reserved word
3837 (W reserved) You used a bareword that might someday be claimed as a
3838 reserved word. It's best to put such a word in quotes, or capitalize it
3839 somehow, or insert an underbar into it. You might also declare it as a
3842 =item Unrecognized character %s
3844 (F) The Perl parser has no idea what to do with the specified character
3845 in your Perl script (or eval). Perhaps you tried to run a compressed
3846 script, a binary program, or a directory as a Perl program.
3848 =item /%s/: Unrecognized escape \\%c in character class passed through
3850 (W regexp) You used a backslash-character combination which is not
3851 recognized by Perl inside character classes. The character was
3852 understood literally.
3854 =item Unrecognized escape \\%c passed through in regex;
3856 marked by <-- HERE in m/%s/
3858 (W regexp) You used a backslash-character combination which is not
3859 recognized by Perl. This combination appears in an interpolated variable or
3860 a C<'>-delimited regular expression. The character was understood
3861 literally. The <-- HERE shows in the regular expression about where the
3862 escape was discovered.
3864 =item Unrecognized escape \\%c passed through
3866 (W misc) You used a backslash-character combination which is not
3869 =item Unrecognized signal name "%s"
3871 (F) You specified a signal name to the kill() function that was not
3872 recognized. Say C<kill -l> in your shell to see the valid signal names
3875 =item Unrecognized switch: -%s (-h will show valid options)
3877 (F) You specified an illegal option to Perl. Don't do that. (If you
3878 think you didn't do that, check the #! line to see if it's supplying the
3879 bad switch on your behalf.)
3881 =item Unsuccessful %s on filename containing newline
3883 (W newline) A file operation was attempted on a filename, and that
3884 operation failed, PROBABLY because the filename contained a newline,
3885 PROBABLY because you forgot to chomp() it off. See L<perlfunc/chomp>.
3887 =item Unsupported directory function "%s" called
3889 (F) Your machine doesn't support opendir() and readdir().
3891 =item Unsupported function %s
3893 (F) This machine doesn't implement the indicated function, apparently.
3894 At least, Configure doesn't think so.
3896 =item Unsupported function fork
3898 (F) Your version of executable does not support forking.
3900 Note that under some systems, like OS/2, there may be different flavors
3901 of Perl executables, some of which may support fork, some not. Try
3902 changing the name you call Perl by to C<perl_>, C<perl__>, and so on.
3904 =item Unsupported script encoding
3906 (F) Your program file begins with a Unicode Byte Order Mark (BOM) which
3907 declares it to be in a Unicode encoding that Perl cannot yet read.
3909 =item Unsupported socket function "%s" called
3911 (F) Your machine doesn't support the Berkeley socket mechanism, or at
3912 least that's what Configure thought.
3914 =item Unterminated attribute list
3916 (F) The lexer found something other than a simple identifier at the
3917 start of an attribute, and it wasn't a semicolon or the start of a
3918 block. Perhaps you terminated the parameter list of the previous
3919 attribute too soon. See L<attributes>.
3921 =item Unterminated attribute parameter in attribute list
3923 (F) The lexer saw an opening (left) parenthesis character while parsing
3924 an attribute list, but the matching closing (right) parenthesis
3925 character was not found. You may need to add (or remove) a backslash
3926 character to get your parentheses to balance. See L<attributes>.
3928 =item Unterminated compressed integer
3930 (F) An argument to unpack("w",...) was incompatible with the BER
3931 compressed integer format and could not be converted to an integer.
3932 See L<perlfunc/pack>.
3934 =item Unterminated <> operator
3936 (F) The lexer saw a left angle bracket in a place where it was expecting
3937 a term, so it's looking for the corresponding right angle bracket, and
3938 not finding it. Chances are you left some needed parentheses out
3939 earlier in the line, and you really meant a "less than".
3941 =item untie attempted while %d inner references still exist
3943 (W untie) A copy of the object returned from C<tie> (or C<tied>) was
3944 still valid when C<untie> was called.
3946 =item Useless (?%s) - use /%s modifier in regex;
3948 marked by <-- HERE in m/%s/
3950 (W regexp) You have used an internal modifier such as (?o) that has no
3951 meaning unless applied to the entire regexp:
3953 if ($string =~ /(?o)$pattern/) { ... }
3957 if ($string =~ /$pattern/o) { ... }
3959 The <-- HERE shows in the regular expression about
3960 where the problem was discovered. See L<perlre>.
3962 =item Useless (?-%s) - don't use /%s modifier in regex;
3964 marked by <-- HERE in m/%s/
3966 (W regexp) You have used an internal modifier such as (?-o) that has no
3967 meaning unless removed from the entire regexp:
3969 if ($string =~ /(?-o)$pattern/o) { ... }
3973 if ($string =~ /$pattern/) { ... }
3975 The <-- HERE shows in the regular expression about
3976 where the problem was discovered. See L<perlre>.
3978 =item Useless use of %s in void context
3980 (W void) You did something without a side effect in a context that does
3981 nothing with the return value, such as a statement that doesn't return a
3982 value from a block, or the left side of a scalar comma operator. Very
3983 often this points not to stupidity on your part, but a failure of Perl
3984 to parse your program the way you thought it would. For example, you'd
3985 get this if you mixed up your C precedence with Python precedence and
3990 when you meant to say
3992 ($one, $two) = (1, 2);
3994 Another common error is to use ordinary parentheses to construct a list
3995 reference when you should be using square or curly brackets, for
4000 when you should have said
4004 The square brackets explicitly turn a list value into a scalar value,
4005 while parentheses do not. So when a parenthesized list is evaluated in
4006 a scalar context, the comma is treated like C's comma operator, which
4007 throws away the left argument, which is not what you want. See
4008 L<perlref> for more on this.
4010 This warning will not be issued for numerical constants equal to 0 or 1
4011 since they are often used in statements like
4013 1 while sub_with_side_effects() ;
4015 String constants that would normally evaluate to 0 or 1 are warned
4018 =item Useless use of "re" pragma
4020 (W) You did C<use re;> without any arguments. That isn't very useful.
4022 =item Useless use of sort in scalar context
4024 (W void) You used sort in scalar context, as in :
4028 This is not very useful, and perl currently optimizes this away.
4030 =item Useless use of %s with no values
4032 (W syntax) You used the push() or unshift() function with no arguments
4033 apart from the array, like C<push(@x)> or C<unshift(@foo)>. That won't
4034 usually have any effect on the array, so is completely useless. It's
4035 possible in principle that push(@tied_array) could have some effect
4036 if the array is tied to a class which implements a PUSH method. If so,
4037 you can write it as C<push(@tied_array,())> to avoid this warning.
4039 =item "use" not allowed in expression
4041 (F) The "use" keyword is recognized and executed at compile time, and
4042 returns no useful value. See L<perlmod>.
4044 =item Use of bare << to mean <<"" is deprecated
4046 (D deprecated) You are now encouraged to use the explicitly quoted form
4047 if you wish to use an empty line as the terminator of the here-document.
4049 =item Use of /c modifier is meaningless in s///
4051 (W regexp) You used the /c modifier in a substitution. The /c
4052 modifier is not presently meaningful in substitutions.
4054 =item Use of /c modifier is meaningless without /g
4056 (W regexp) You used the /c modifier with a regex operand, but didn't
4057 use the /g modifier. Currently, /c is meaningful only when /g is
4058 used. (This may change in the future.)
4060 =item Use of /g modifier is meaningless in split
4062 (W regexp) You used the /g modifier on the pattern for a C<split>
4063 operator. Since C<split> always tries to match the pattern
4064 repeatedly, the C</g> has no effect.
4066 =item Use of *glob{FILEHANDLE} is deprecated
4068 (D deprecated) You are now encouraged to use the shorter *glob{IO} form
4069 to access the filehandle slot within a typeglob.
4071 =item Use of chdir('') or chdir(undef) as chdir() deprecated
4073 (D deprecated) chdir() with no arguments is documented to change to
4074 $ENV{HOME} or $ENV{LOGDIR}. chdir(undef) and chdir('') share this
4075 behavior, but that has been deprecated. In future versions they
4078 Be careful to check that what you pass to chdir() is defined and not
4079 blank, else you might find yourself in your home directory.
4081 =item Use of implicit split to @_ is deprecated
4083 (D deprecated) It makes a lot of work for the compiler when you clobber
4084 a subroutine's argument list, so it's better if you assign the results
4085 of a split() explicitly to an array (or list).
4087 =item Use of inherited AUTOLOAD for non-method %s() is deprecated
4089 (D deprecated) As an (ahem) accidental feature, C<AUTOLOAD> subroutines
4090 are looked up as methods (using the C<@ISA> hierarchy) even when the
4091 subroutines to be autoloaded were called as plain functions (e.g.
4092 C<Foo::bar()>), not as methods (e.g. C<< Foo->bar() >> or C<<
4095 This bug will be rectified in future by using method lookup only for
4096 methods' C<AUTOLOAD>s. However, there is a significant base of existing
4097 code that may be using the old behavior. So, as an interim step, Perl
4098 currently issues an optional warning when non-methods use inherited
4101 The simple rule is: Inheritance will not work when autoloading
4102 non-methods. The simple fix for old code is: In any module that used
4103 to depend on inheriting C<AUTOLOAD> for non-methods from a base class
4104 named C<BaseClass>, execute C<*AUTOLOAD = \&BaseClass::AUTOLOAD> during
4107 In code that currently says C<use AutoLoader; @ISA = qw(AutoLoader);>
4108 you should remove AutoLoader from @ISA and change C<use AutoLoader;> to
4109 C<use AutoLoader 'AUTOLOAD';>.
4111 =item Use of -l on filehandle %s
4113 (W io) A filehandle represents an opened file, and when you opened the file
4114 it already went past any symlink you are presumably trying to look for.
4115 The operation returned C<undef>. Use a filename instead.
4117 =item Use of "package" with no arguments is deprecated
4119 (D deprecated) You used the C<package> keyword without specifying a package
4120 name. So no namespace is current at all. Using this can cause many
4121 otherwise reasonable constructs to fail in baffling ways. C<use strict;>
4124 =item Use of %s in printf format not supported
4126 (F) You attempted to use a feature of printf that is accessible from
4127 only C. This usually means there's a better way to do it in Perl.
4129 =item Use of $* is deprecated
4131 (D deprecated) This variable magically turned on multi-line pattern
4132 matching, both for you and for any luckless subroutine that you happen
4133 to call. You should use the new C<//m> and C<//s> modifiers now to do
4134 that without the dangerous action-at-a-distance effects of C<$*>.
4136 =item Use of %s is deprecated
4138 (D deprecated) The construct indicated is no longer recommended for use,
4139 generally because there's a better way to do it, and also because the
4140 old way has bad side effects.
4142 =item Use of $# is deprecated
4144 (D deprecated) This was an ill-advised attempt to emulate a poorly
4145 defined B<awk> feature. Use an explicit printf() or sprintf() instead.
4147 =item Use of reference "%s" as array index
4149 (W misc) You tried to use a reference as an array index; this probably
4150 isn't what you mean, because references in numerical context tend
4151 to be huge numbers, and so usually indicates programmer error.
4153 If you really do mean it, explicitly numify your reference, like so:
4154 C<$array[0+$ref]>. This warning is not given for overloaded objects,
4155 either, because you can overload the numification and stringification
4156 operators and then you assumedly know what you are doing.
4158 =item Use of reserved word "%s" is deprecated
4160 (D deprecated) The indicated bareword is a reserved word. Future
4161 versions of perl may use it as a keyword, so you're better off either
4162 explicitly quoting the word in a manner appropriate for its context of
4163 use, or using a different name altogether. The warning can be
4164 suppressed for subroutine names by either adding a C<&> prefix, or using
4165 a package qualifier, e.g. C<&our()>, or C<Foo::our()>.
4167 =item Use of tainted arguments in %s is deprecated
4169 (W taint, deprecated) You have supplied C<system()> or C<exec()> with multiple
4170 arguments and at least one of them is tainted. This used to be allowed
4171 but will become a fatal error in a future version of perl. Untaint your
4172 arguments. See L<perlsec>.
4174 =item Use of uninitialized value%s
4176 (W uninitialized) An undefined value was used as if it were already
4177 defined. It was interpreted as a "" or a 0, but maybe it was a mistake.
4178 To suppress this warning assign a defined value to your variables.
4180 To help you figure out what was undefined, perl tells you what operation
4181 you used the undefined value in. Note, however, that perl optimizes your
4182 program and the operation displayed in the warning may not necessarily
4183 appear literally in your program. For example, C<"that $foo"> is
4184 usually optimized into C<"that " . $foo>, and the warning will refer to
4185 the C<concatenation (.)> operator, even though there is no C<.> in your
4188 =item Using a hash as a reference is deprecated
4190 (D deprecated) You tried to use a hash as a reference, as in
4191 C<< %foo->{"bar"} >> or C<< %$ref->{"hello"} >>. Versions of perl <= 5.6.1
4192 used to allow this syntax, but shouldn't have. It is now deprecated, and will
4193 be removed in a future version.
4195 =item Using an array as a reference is deprecated
4197 (D deprecated) You tried to use an array as a reference, as in
4198 C<< @foo->[23] >> or C<< @$ref->[99] >>. Versions of perl <= 5.6.1 used to
4199 allow this syntax, but shouldn't have. It is now deprecated, and will be
4200 removed in a future version.
4202 =item UTF-16 surrogate %s
4204 (W utf8) You tried to generate half of an UTF-16 surrogate by
4205 requesting a Unicode character between the code points 0xD800 and
4206 0xDFFF (inclusive). That range is reserved exclusively for the use of
4207 UTF-16 encoding (by having two 16-bit UCS-2 characters); but Perl
4208 encodes its characters in UTF-8, so what you got is a very illegal
4209 character. If you really know what you are doing you can turn off
4210 this warning by C<no warnings 'utf8';>.
4212 =item Value of %s can be "0"; test with defined()
4214 (W misc) In a conditional expression, you used <HANDLE>, <*> (glob),
4215 C<each()>, or C<readdir()> as a boolean value. Each of these constructs
4216 can return a value of "0"; that would make the conditional expression
4217 false, which is probably not what you intended. When using these
4218 constructs in conditional expressions, test their values with the
4219 C<defined> operator.
4221 =item Value of CLI symbol "%s" too long
4223 (W misc) A warning peculiar to VMS. Perl tried to read the value of an
4224 %ENV element from a CLI symbol table, and found a resultant string
4225 longer than 1024 characters. The return value has been truncated to
4228 =item Variable "%s" is not imported%s
4230 (F) While "use strict" in effect, you referred to a global variable that
4231 you apparently thought was imported from another module, because
4232 something else of the same name (usually a subroutine) is exported by
4233 that module. It usually means you put the wrong funny character on the
4234 front of your variable.
4236 =item "%s" variable %s masks earlier declaration in same %s
4238 (W misc) A "my" or "our" variable has been redeclared in the current
4239 scope or statement, effectively eliminating all access to the previous
4240 instance. This is almost always a typographical error. Note that the
4241 earlier variable will still exist until the end of the scope or until
4242 all closure referents to it are destroyed.
4244 =item Variable "%s" may be unavailable
4246 (W closure) An inner (nested) I<anonymous> subroutine is inside a
4247 I<named> subroutine, and outside that is another subroutine; and the
4248 anonymous (innermost) subroutine is referencing a lexical variable
4249 defined in the outermost subroutine. For example:
4251 sub outermost { my $a; sub middle { sub { $a } } }
4253 If the anonymous subroutine is called or referenced (directly or
4254 indirectly) from the outermost subroutine, it will share the variable as
4255 you would expect. But if the anonymous subroutine is called or
4256 referenced when the outermost subroutine is not active, it will see the
4257 value of the shared variable as it was before and during the *first*
4258 call to the outermost subroutine, which is probably not what you want.
4260 In these circumstances, it is usually best to make the middle subroutine
4261 anonymous, using the C<sub {}> syntax. Perl has specific support for
4262 shared variables in nested anonymous subroutines; a named subroutine in
4263 between interferes with this feature.
4265 =item Variable syntax
4267 (A) You've accidentally run your script through B<csh> instead
4268 of Perl. Check the #! line, or manually feed your script into
4271 =item Variable "%s" will not stay shared
4273 (W closure) An inner (nested) I<named> subroutine is referencing a
4274 lexical variable defined in an outer subroutine.
4276 When the inner subroutine is called, it will probably see the value of
4277 the outer subroutine's variable as it was before and during the *first*
4278 call to the outer subroutine; in this case, after the first call to the
4279 outer subroutine is complete, the inner and outer subroutines will no
4280 longer share a common value for the variable. In other words, the
4281 variable will no longer be shared.
4283 Furthermore, if the outer subroutine is anonymous and references a
4284 lexical variable outside itself, then the outer and inner subroutines
4285 will I<never> share the given variable.
4287 This problem can usually be solved by making the inner subroutine
4288 anonymous, using the C<sub {}> syntax. When inner anonymous subs that
4289 reference variables in outer subroutines are called or referenced, they
4290 are automatically rebound to the current values of such variables.
4292 =item Variable length lookbehind not implemented in regex;
4294 marked by <-- HERE in m/%s/
4296 (F) Lookbehind is allowed only for subexpressions whose length is fixed and
4297 known at compile time. The <-- HERE shows in the regular expression about
4298 where the problem was discovered. See L<perlre>.
4300 =item Version number must be a constant number
4302 (P) The attempt to translate a C<use Module n.n LIST> statement into
4303 its equivalent C<BEGIN> block found an internal inconsistency with
4306 =item v-string in use/require is non-portable
4308 (W portable) The use of v-strings is non-portable to older, pre-5.6, Perls.
4309 If you want your scripts to be backward portable, use the floating
4310 point version number: for example, instead of C<use 5.6.1> say
4311 C<use 5.006_001>. This of course won't help: the older Perls
4312 won't suddenly start understanding newer features, but at least
4313 they will show a sensible error message indicating the required
4316 =item Warning: something's wrong
4318 (W) You passed warn() an empty string (the equivalent of C<warn "">) or
4319 you called it with no args and C<$_> was empty.
4321 =item Warning: unable to close filehandle %s properly
4323 (S) The implicit close() done by an open() got an error indication on
4324 the close(). This usually indicates your file system ran out of disk
4327 =item Warning: Use of "%s" without parentheses is ambiguous
4329 (S ambiguous) You wrote a unary operator followed by something that
4330 looks like a binary operator that could also have been interpreted as a
4331 term or unary operator. For instance, if you know that the rand
4332 function has a default argument of 1.0, and you write
4336 you may THINK you wrote the same thing as
4340 but in actual fact, you got
4344 So put in parentheses to say what you really mean.
4346 =item Wide character in %s
4348 (W utf8) Perl met a wide character (>255) when it wasn't expecting
4349 one. This warning is by default on for I/O (like print) but can be
4350 turned off by C<no warnings 'utf8';>. You are supposed to explicitly
4351 mark the filehandle with an encoding, see L<open> and L<perlfunc/binmode>.
4353 =item write() on closed filehandle %s
4355 (W closed) The filehandle you're writing to got itself closed sometime
4356 before now. Check your control flow.
4358 =item X outside of string
4360 (F) You had a pack template that specified a relative position before
4361 the beginning of the string being unpacked. See L<perlfunc/pack>.
4363 =item x outside of string
4365 (F) You had a pack template that specified a relative position after
4366 the end of the string being unpacked. See L<perlfunc/pack>.
4368 =item Xsub "%s" called in sort
4370 (F) The use of an external subroutine as a sort comparison is not yet
4373 =item Xsub called in sort
4375 (F) The use of an external subroutine as a sort comparison is not yet
4378 =item YOU HAVEN'T DISABLED SET-ID SCRIPTS IN THE KERNEL YET!
4380 (F) And you probably never will, because you probably don't have the
4381 sources to your kernel, and your vendor probably doesn't give a rip
4382 about what you want. Your best bet is to put a setuid C wrapper around
4385 =item You need to quote "%s"
4387 (W syntax) You assigned a bareword as a signal handler name.
4388 Unfortunately, you already have a subroutine of that name declared,
4389 which means that Perl 5 will try to call the subroutine when the
4390 assignment is executed, which is probably not what you want. (If it IS
4391 what you want, put an & in front.)