That is not the case if you are setting the -T switch for taint checking -- the shebang line must point to the Perl interpreter, otherwise your script will fail. So it's a good habit to get into. You can use forward slashes (#! c:/perl/bin/perl.exe -w), so it doesn't have to look too ugly.

This does depend on the way the script is called, for instance, if you say perl -T script it'll work fine, but if you use Win32 file associations (such as running from Win32 Apache -- which is where I was bitten by this), the script will fail. It took me ages to track that down when it first happened. In fact, I didn't solve it. It was only much later reading the AS documentation that I serendipitously found the solution.

g r i n d e r