Re: /usr/bin/perl -w?

[chas]

And with regard to ysth's reply, I once noted that if my shebang line was #!/usr/bin/perl followed by a carriage return (due to editing the script on a Windows machine and then transferring to Linux), the script exited with an error that the command was not found. (Putting -w at the end of the line fixed the problem, because then the carriage return was ignored as an unknown option, I think.) You can check if the return is there by editing the script in binary mode with vi(m) or emacs, etc.
chas

[jhourcle]

For this very reason, I recommend that you end the shebang line with --.

[kaif]

And Unix commands in general, too! Because of shell design and such, typing rm * in a directory which contains a file named -rf could delete everything (except the file -rf)! You should do rm -- * instead. I have actually been bitten by this once or twice, but luckily not by -rf but something more mundane.

[jasonk]

I've seen some people use this to their advantage too, by creating files called '-i' in directories containing things they don't want to lose. That way an inadvertant rm * will become interactive.

[ysth]

Some people take the approach of creating a "/usr/bin/perl\r" link to /usr/bin/perl :)

[jhourcle]

That works when you're root. It doesn't work when you're just an average user.

Even as root on multi-user systems, I'd rather not give the users training wheels, as it teaches them to be sloppy, and to learn to do things wrong. (Like when I had to explain to someone that 'rm *' doesn't prompt you for which files to delete on every unix system... but the sysadmin on the system they learned had aliased 'rm' to 'rm -i')

[biochris]

Looks like it worked. thanks so much