I have a troublesome script which is causing some grief. I've simplified it to a few lines, but the output is confusing me. It seems that tr or basename are being called somewhere without paths.

The script fails on Debian 3.0, but works on Fedora.
Here it is:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;

$ENV{'PATH'}=''; # removing this line makes it work

open (MAILQ, "/usr/bin/mailq |")
        or die "open failed: $!\n";
[download]

And here is the error:

/usr/bin/mailq: basename: No such file or directory
/usr/bin/mailq: tr: No such file or directory
[download]

Updated Steve_p - changed pre tags to code tags

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