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Date:      Wed, 29 Dec 1999 08:50:29 -0500 (EST)
From:      Will Andrews <andrews@TECHNOLOGIST.COM>
To:        Arjan van der Oest <arjan@nl.demon.net>
Cc:        freebsd-isp@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   RE: FreeBSD and Perl
Message-ID:  <XFMail.991229085029.andrews@TECHNOLOGIST.COM>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.4.10.9912291144350.72353-100000@bunker.noc.nl.demon.net>

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On 29-Dec-99 Arjan van der Oest wrote:
> We used to run our webservers on NetBSD but recently changed over to
> FreeBSD 3.3r. We've seen a lot of perl scripts break becase they start
> with the first line : #!/bin/perl -- -*-perl-*-

This looks familiar. I'm pretty sure that "-*-perl-*-" is just an Emacs way of
getting syntax highlighting (in addition to some Emacs feaures) for the script
as a Perl script.

> NetBSD seemed to pass this as a single argument to the interpreter and
> perl ignored it. FreeBSD now seems to pass this line as two arguments to
> the interpreter, braking the script because it tries to open script
> -*-perl-*-.

You can probably comment this "-*-perl-*-" out on a line below #!/usr/bin/perl
(not #!/bin/perl since Perl is installed in /usr by default on FreeBSD).

Like this:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
# -*-perl-*-
#
[...code...]

Or, at your leisure, you can delete the string entirely. Note that I've
replaced "--" with "-w". See perl(1) manpage. "--" is, if I am not mistaken,
intended to be used with a file..

> Besides the fact that I see no use of inserting "-- -*-perl-*-" in the
> scripts, does anyone recognises this problem ? How did you deal with this?
> We've got a lot of customers who use standard scripts and this line
> appears in a lot of examples/books/pre-written script, thus causing lots
> of people calling tech support.

I'm afraid that the original programmer likes Emacs. ;)

I stop here at the risk of triggering a holy war. *grin*

--
Will Andrews <andrews@technologist.com>
GCS/E/S @d- s+:+>+:- a--->+++ C++ UB++++ P+ L- E--- W+++ !N !o ?K w---
?O M+ V-- PS+ PE++ Y+ PGP+>+++ t++ 5 X++ R+ tv+ b++>++++ DI+++ D+ 
G++>+++ e->++++ h! r-->+++ y?


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