$ perl -we " qq{\@@foo} " Possible unintended interpolation of @foo in string at -e line 1. Useless use of string in void context at -e line 1. Name "main::foo" used only once: possible typo at -e line 1. $ perl -Mdiagnostics -we " qq{\@@foo} " Possible unintended interpolation of @foo in string at -e line 1 (#1) (W ambiguous) You said something like '@foo' in a double-quoted string but there was no array @foo in scope at the time. If you wanted a literal @foo, then write it as \@foo; otherwise find out what happened to the array you apparently lost track of. Useless use of string in void context at -e line 1 (#2) (W void) You did something without a side effect in a context that does nothing with the return value, such as a statement that doesn't return a value from a block, or the left side of a scalar comma operator. Very often this points not to stupidity on your part, but a failure of Perl to parse your program the way you thought it would. For example, you'd get this if you mixed up your C precedence with Python precedence and said $one, $two = 1, 2; when you meant to say ($one, $two) = (1, 2); Another common error is to use ordinary parentheses to construct a list reference when you should be using square or curly brackets, for example, if you say $array = (1,2); when you should have said $array = [1,2]; The square brackets explicitly turn a list value into a scalar value, while parentheses do not. So when a parenthesized list is evaluated in a scalar context, the comma is treated like C's comma operator, which throws away the left argument, which is not what you want. See perlref for more on this. This warning will not be issued for numerical constants equal to 0 or 1 since they are often used in statements like 1 while sub_with_side_effects(); String constants that would normally evaluate to 0 or 1 are warned about. Name "main::foo" used only once: possible typo at -e line 1 (#3) (W once) Typographical errors often show up as unique variable names. If you had a good reason for having a unique name, then just mention it again somehow to suppress the message. The our declaration is provided for this purpose. NOTE: This warning detects symbols that have been used only once so $c, @c, %c, *c, &c, sub c{}, c(), and c (the filehandle or format) are considered the same; if a program uses $c only once but also uses any of the others it will not trigger this warning.