=head1 NAME
-perlfaq7 - General Perl Language Issues ($Revision: 1.12 $, $Date: 2002/12/06 07:40:11 $)
+perlfaq7 - General Perl Language Issues ($Revision: 1.15 $, $Date: 2003/07/24 02:17:21 $)
=head1 DESCRIPTION
are effectively shallowly bound. Consider this just one more reason
not to use them. See the answer to L<"What's a closure?">.
-=head2 Why doesn't "my($foo) = <FILE>;" work right?
+=head2 Why doesn't "my($foo) = E<lt>FILEE<gt>;" work right?
C<my()> and C<local()> give list context to the right hand side
of C<=>. The <FH> read operation, like so many of Perl's
(like C<%main::>) instead of a user-defined hash. The solution is to
use your own hash or a real reference instead.
- $fred = 23;
+ $USER_VARS{"fred"} = 23;
$varname = "fred";
$USER_VARS{$varname}++; # not $$varname++
For scalars, arrays, and hashes, though--and usually for subroutines--
you probably only want to use hard references.
+=head2 What does "bad interpreter" mean?
+
+The "bad interpreter" message comes from the shell, not perl. The
+actual message may vary depending on your platform, shell, and locale
+settings.
+
+If you see "bad interpreter - no such file or directory", the first
+line in your perl script (the "shebang" line) does not contain the
+right path to perl (or any other program capable of running scripts).
+Sometimes this happens when you move the script from one machine to
+another and each machine has a different path to perl---/usr/bin/perl
+versus /usr/local/bin/perl for instance.
+
+If you see "bad interpreter: Permission denied", you need to make your
+script executable.
+
+In either case, you should still be able to run the scripts with perl
+explicitly:
+
+ % perl script.pl
+
+If you get a message like "perl: command not found", perl is not in
+your PATH, which might also mean that the location of perl is not
+where you expect it so you need to adjust your shebang line.
+
=head1 AUTHOR AND COPYRIGHT
Copyright (c) 1997-2002 Tom Christiansen and Nathan Torkington.