Afternoon,

hoping someone might be able to suggest a possible reason for my problem and perhaps a solution as well.

i'm using Red Hat Enterprise, Linux Server 5.3.

I've got a perl script that runs as expected when invoked with the perl command, but
doesn't run when I specify #!/usr/bin/perl at the top of the file and attempt to run the script without the perl command.

the command whereis perl returns /usr/bin/perl, so I'm not sure why the script wouldn't run using the she-bang.

It's not script permissions, so I'm a bit stumped as to the cause of this.

any ideas?

TIA,

DanishGambit.

Have you got errors in the script such as DOS-style line endings?

Is the script on a filesystem mounted noexec?

thanks for the prompt response - no errors on the script itself - as mentioned it runs fine when the script is invoked with the perl command, it's only when I try to rely on the she-bang that it doesn't run.

No, I presume it's not because other non-perl scripts run fine.

What error messages do you see?

when I run it with the perl command, no errors, runs fine.

but when I put the sh-bang at the start of the file, i.e. #!/usr/bin/perl, it returns errors:

-bash: =: command not found
-bash: print: command not found

it's almost like it's ignoring the sh-bang.

Perhaps you saved the file as UTF? Try to make sure that it's in ASCII form.

And you don't use bash to run the file do you?

what do these return?

no, it's ascii. I don't explicitly run the script with bash, but bash is set as the default shell (the environment variable $SHELL is set to /bin/bash

Cheers,

DanishGambit.

Ginola,

which perl returns /usr/bin/perl

and file myfile.pl returns

perl script text executable

Can you post the first ten lines of code?

And might as well be

1 members found this post helpful.

Hi Ginola,

even the simple script has the same issue

#!/usr/bin/perl
# this should be working

print "work, dammit, work!!\n";

the hexdump shows

00000000 23 21 2f 75 73 72 2f 62 69 6e 2f 70 65 72 6c 0a |#!/usr/bin/perl.|
00000010 23 20 2d 20 73 68 6f 75 6c 64 20 62 65 20 77 6f |# - should be wo|
00000020 72 6b 69 6e 67 0a 0a 70 72 69 6e 74 20 22 57 6f |rking..print "Wo|
00000030 72 6b 2c 20 64 61 6d 6e 20 79 6f 75 2c 20 77 6f |rk, damn you, wo|
00000040 72 6b 21 21 5c 6e 22 3b 0a 0a |rk!!\n";..|
0000004a

Well that seems normal. I wonder if your /usr/bin/perl is actually a bash script.

I ran your script and it has no problem with me.

cheers, thanks for your time.

DanishGambit.

What is the name of the file? It isn't conflicting with some other filename in the system, especially soemthing found in $PATH, is it? Any alias conflict? Are you executing the specific filespec, or assuming your script is found in $PATH somewhere?
--- rod.