Well, I just tried it out with 5.8.0 and 5.6.1, and -T wasn't the problem. It worked for me with or without -T. The problems that I see in your code are first, that -i doesn't affect @INC at all, but since you say that directory appears in the error message, I'm assuming you actually have -I. And second, perl doesn't understand ~me, you need to put a fully-qualified path there.