Re: Load-Bearing Warnings

Gaal Yahas writes:

> On Mon, Sep 13, 2004 at 10:53:55PM -0000, Smylers <[email protected]>
> wrote:
> 
> > And that breaks things, cos perl^M isn't something that BSD can execute.
> 
> Of course it is something that BSD can execute. You just don't happen
> to have an executable called perl^M in /usr/bin/. :)

Of course.  As it is, I solved the problem by saving the file with Unix
line-breaks, but creating a symlink called perl^M would certainly have
been more fun.

> Anyway, since most systems don't have it either, I almost always put
> -w on the #! line ...

I hadn't realized that this was a known technique that was used
intentionally.  Is it documented or in an FAQ anywhere?  Certainly I'd
been under the impression that only the purpose of -w was to enable
warnings, and this secondary use is new to me.

> ... even if my script is bound to run on 5.8, which supports the
> warnings pragma, ...

Though of course they do different things.  The warnings pragma just
enables warnings in your main script, whereas -w also turns them on in
used modules that don't use warnings -- which can be either a good or a
bad thing, depending on the modules in question.

> to exploit the behavior you encountered here.  Looks like I wasn't the
> only one.

Oh, I can assure you that this behaviour was not at all intentional --
the script's authors weren't even at the stage of initializing variables
-- merely 'lucky', for some definition of "lucky".

Smylers