that works thank you... and I don't even need #!/usr/bin/perl, just #!perl is enough actually, and that was working fine. This one script I stumbled on had #!env perl instead, and that didn't work well for some reason. Possibly a bug in the installer, because #!perl is getting translated quite correctly to #!/usr/bin/perl, while #!env perl translated to #!/usr/bin/env perl but newline is not stripped properly