Perl thinks it's the shell!

[misterw]

Running on XP I type:

perl program.pl

at the console prompt and get the following

Can't exec /c/apps/pp3.exe at download.pl line 1.

program.pl looks like this:

  #!/c/apps/pp3.exe

  print "Hello\n";

The shebang notation is there for cygwin. pp3.exe is a c program that translates cygwin paths to windows paths before calling the real perl interpreter. So that if I run the script from bash like this:

$ program.pl /c/some/path/orother

then the right path (using windows path separators) gets through to the (activestate) perl interpreter
Which is all good, except (back to the original problem) why is perl.exe even looking at this line? As far as it's concerned it's a comment, right?

I've tried:

c:\Perl\bin\Perl.exe program.pl

and also double clicking program.pl in explorer and perl.exe seems to want to evaluate the shebang notation.

I'm sure this is not the normal perl for windows (or any platform) behaviour???

...More testing...
In fact if I set the shebang to another c program such as args.exe then it runs that instead of the perl interpreter even though perl calls the script directly

I have a bad feeling I'm missing something here...

Matt

Perl is:

perl -v

This is perl, v5.8.6 built for MSWin32-x86-multi-thread
(with 3 registered patches, see perl -V for more detail)

Copyright 1987-2004, Larry Wall

Binary build 811 provided by ActiveState Corp. http://www.ActiveState.
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Built Dec 13 2004 09:52:01

20050502 Edit by ysth: change pre to code tags