Thanks for replying.

"A search on DuckDuckGo brings up some relevant results."

That is, in fact, the search engine I used. Could you post the URL you used which returned the "relevant results". I seached for "shebang perl openSUSE", which ended up as this URL: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=shebang+perl+openSUSE&t=opensuse&ia=qa.

I didn't see any results where 'perl -l' (or 'perl -w' or similar) was treated as a single filename containing a space character. As I wrote that, I thought I might try the same code as before with this shebang line:

#!/usr/bin/env perl -w
[download]

When run, that now produces:

ken@ibm-laptop:~/tmp> test_shebang.pl
/usr/bin/env: perl -w: No such file or directory
[download]

I checked "man env" and subsequently, from the information it suplied, "info '(coreutils) env invocation'" and http://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/manual/coreutils.html#env-invocation. All show an invocation of this form:

env [option]… [name=value]… [command [args]…]
[download]

As far as I can see, none mention anything special about the space after "command".

I've been using shebang lines like this for over a decade. I would have posted dozens (if not hundreds) of scripts on this site using "#!/usr/bin/env perl -l" without a single complaint.

If 'perl -l' is being interpreted as a single filename (containing a space character), that would be most unusual behaviour and I would hope there would be a way to turn it off.

Hi

See perlrun , when  #!/usr/bin/env perl -l doesn't work use

#!/bin/sh
#! -*-perl-*-
eval 'exec perl -x -wS $0 ${1+"$@"}'
    if 0;
[download]

Also see https://www.in-ulm.de/~mascheck/various/shebang/#splitting which says

Splitting arguments

A very few systems deliver only the first argument, some systems split
+ up the arguments like a shell to fill up argv[],
most systems deliver all arguments as a single string. See the table b
+elow. I noticed that for Linux (delivering all arguments as one strin
+g),
a patch to split up was suggested on the Linux kernel mailing list (de
+ad link, try this page, archive.org), followed by a discussion of som
+e portability issues.
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See also https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/361794/why-am-i-able-to-pass-arguments-to-usr-bin-env-in-this-case?rq=1, https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4303128/how-to-use-multiple-arguments-for-awk-with-a-shebang-i-e...

++ Thanks beech, that answers my question and resolves the issue.

The table showing different behaviours was particularly helpful. It would appear that I have mostly been using OSes that do parse all arguments separately; for instance, I've had Mac OS X at home for the last eight years and that's what I would have used, almost exclusively, for scripts I've posted on this site. I was quite unaware that wasn't the normal case: hence my surprise at the behaviour on this borrowed laptop.

— Ken

I had searched for "shebang env perl switch".

Thanks. That's better search criteria and produces, as you said, "some relevant results".

— Ken

... perl -l parses the run time options by itself ...

I meant perl the interpreter parses the options, not perl -l.