1. I expect you've done "man perldiag" and read down to the "bad name" diagnosis message. Haven't you?

2. Even so, you're still confused, huh? I strongly suspect that this is due to Perl's old way of defining package namespaces. Instead of Foo::Bar (and $Foo::bar, @Foo::bar etc.), Perl used to allow Foo'Bar, $Foo'Bar etc. And this is still allowed for backwards compatibility. So, somewhere in your script, perl is interpreting a string quote as part of a variable name. (I don't know where because you haven't told me the real var name shown in the error.)

The solution? More whitespace should help the interpreter out.

dave hj~