Re^6: Bug in perl command line processing?

From what I can tell, -i has to actually appear on the command-line

Yup,

$ cat uhoh
#!/usr/bin/perl -i.bak e die(666)
1;

$ perl uhoh
Can't emulate -e on #! line at uhoh line 1.
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which hopefully self-limits its significance as a tool for exploit.

Hmm, the only exploit situation i an envision is someone naively automating perl, for example from perl

system $^X, "-i$bak", ...
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which doesn't seem unreasonable. I suppose given that -e commandline documents

$ perl  -e warn(1); -e die(2);
1 at -e line 1.
2 at -e line 2.
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folks might be scared away from automating perl this way, but then again whitespace in paths is not unheard of