I don't know about earlier perls, but from what I've seen of perl5 that is nonsense. Try it

$ cat bark
#!/usr/bin/perl

print " @ARGV 

";
__END__
$ ./bark -V
 -V
[download]

See. Perl doesn't try to interpret -V like it would if you said perl -V. It'd be stupid if it did, since you obviously didn't invoke perl, you invoked bark.

MJD says you can't just make shit up and expect the computer to know what you mean, retardo! I run a Win32 PPM repository for perl 5.6x+5.8x. I take requests. ** The Third rule of perl club is a statement of fact: pod is sexy.