Generally when you get funky error messages that seem to have words missing at the beginning, it's because the words that were printed included some funky unprintable characters (frequently \r, which causes the second part of the error message to overwrite the first part). Try this: 'perl tn52400.pl | cat -vet', and if you see funky characters in there, try 'cat -vet tn52400.pl' to see if they are in your script too...