Guys,

I am SO embarrased by this. I can't get my hello world Perl program to work (oh the shame of it). Here it is

firstperl:

#!/usr/bin/perl
#
# Program to do the obvious
#
print 'Hello world.'; # Print a message

I've done a chmod +x firstperl. I also had to take out 'local' from the shebang first line. I get the error

bash : print : command not found

which kinda tells me Fedora Core 3 still thinks its a bash script.

How do I get it to recognize it as a perl program.

Sorry to be so lame, thanks

Meadensi

are you sure perl is in /usr/bin ? type `which perl` to check it. When I run it, it works... Try to run :
Maybe it will run ?

Thanks mmmmm,

perl firstperl works and this is enough to get me going so I can continue with Perl tutorial.

However when I did

which perl

I got

/usr/bin/perl

Thanks anyway.

Meadensi

Thats messed up, try doing this:

/usr/bin/perl yourscriptname


There shouldn't be a difference between that, and simply doing a

./yourscriptname


But at least you can run scripts and learn how to write Perl, I still think its pretty weird though.

you don't by chance have a blank line or space before the #!, do you?

Perhaps it's a DOS text file.

If you run "perl mydosfile.pl", the Perl will happily ignore the CR/LF's, and it will work.

If you run "./mydosfile.pl", however, the shell will see "#!/usr/bin/perl" and try to execute something it thinks is "/usr/bin/perl^M". And barf.

Please try this:

a) vi -b myfile.pl
<= DO A "BINARY EDIT" OF YOUR "HELLO PERL" TEXT FILE

b) Delete any/all "^M" (DOS CR/LF end-of-line characters) you find

c) Save and try "./myfile.pl" again

This is my mistake. As with bash scripts I need to use the period. DOH!

Just for the record ./firstperl works as does
/usr/bin/perl firstperl

Also for the record it was created originally in vi (not a DOS file) and there were no blanks spaces or blank top lines.

The limitation is the same as for bash scripts. On my machine I have to do

bash mybashscript or ./mybashscript

I cannot just do
mybashscript despite the she-bang top line declaring it to run under bash. I think I read somewhere that its is some sort of security restriction.

I suppose I should not expect any different for perl scripts.

To continue I will use either

perl myperlscript or ./myperlscript

Thanks for all your efforts guys I appreciate it, another vodka and tonic for me ....
Meadensi

Your script is not in your PATH, so you can not execute it
with simply typing its name, you have to give the full path
like /path/to/myperlscript or ./myperlscript (if myperlscript
is in the current directory)

For my part, I created a bin directory in my $HOME and
added it to my PATH in my ~/.bashrc file :
So I simply put all my scripts here and I can execute them
with their name at command line (without the period or
the full path)