I believe the use of $[ has been deprecated in recent versions of perl which is why you're getting the error. You can achieve the same effect by taking advantage the for statement modifer

@array = qw(foo bar spam eggs);
print for @array;
[download]

This is infintely safer and saner than mucking about with $[ who's inclusion is mainly for programmer compatibility with AWK. See the perlvar manpage for more info on $[.
HTH

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broquaint