I agree with Ovid on this issue. We run into this problem at one of my consulting clients all the time. Many developers prefer to use a wincvs in spite of the fact that the only execution environment on the client site is an HP/UX box. When Perl scripts are ftp'ed to the host and edited with vi or emacs, I often see extra ^M characters at the end of each line in the file. This is another symptom of the same condition.

Another way to strip unneeded carriage returns is to use the dos2ux command present in many Unix distros. YMMV.

I would like to take this opportunity to warn our fellow monks that all of us should see this problem before we encounter it as a runtime error. No Perl script should be downloaded from any third party web site and blindly executed on any machine that you care about. Every Perl script should be given the once-over by a fairly experienced Perl developer. In order to avoid problems like this, you probably ought to look at the script through an editor running on the target OS.

Dave Aiello
Chatham Township Data Corporation