Re: require in .pm and .pl = blow up?

[le]

This is just a wild guess, but maybe there's a missing "1;" and the end of vars.pl.

[chromatic]

A decent guess, but not the case.

Perl requires that the last statement in a module be true... a variable assignment returns a true value, so that'll work.

Generally people put 1; as the last line in module just because there's almost no way it can ever evaluate to anything but true, whereas lots of other seemingly straightforward statements actually might. See perlmod for details.