I am using an old version of perl (which i cannot avoid) but the part about deprecation made me think that the sysadmin finally upgraded it without my knowlege to some weird perl6 beta or something odd like that, but with some proding (I dont have shell access to the machiene, just ftp) I was able to coax this out of it

This is perl, version 5.005_03 built for i386-linux
Copyright 1987-1999, Larry Wall

Perl may be copied only under the terms of either the Artistic License or the GNU General Public License, which may be found in the Perl 5.0 source kit.

Complete documentation for Perl, including FAQ lists, should be found on this system using `man perl' or `perldoc perl'. If you have access to the Internet, point your browser at http://www.perl.com/, the Perl Home Page.

So that is indeed odd and looks like use vars and I are going to have to get aquanted.

sadly this computer just landed itself under my dominion and it is a bit different on that version of perl.
thanks for the help.