My problem is that I am trying to use -F command line switch on the #! line but it does not look like it follows the docs in perlrun.

According to my copy of perlrun -F has this description

-Fpattern
      specifies the pattern to split on if -a is also in
      effect.  The pattern may be surrounded by "//", """",
      or "''", otherwise it will be put in single quotes.
If I put the code below in a file and run it like this perl test.pl
#!/usr/bin/perl -apnF"monkey"
use Data::Dumper;
print Data::Dumper->Dump([\@F]);

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I get in perl version 5.6.1 on linux this error message

"use" not allowed in expression at test.pl line 2, at end of line
syntax error at test.pl line 2, near "use Data::Dumper"
Execution of test.pl aborted due to compilation errors.

When I got this error I changed the first line into this
#!/usr/bin/perl -apnF "monkey"

The code runs and if you type 'my monkey' @F does not have 2 elements in it as expected. Instead Data::Dumper prints out this

$VAR1 = [
          'my monkey
'
        ];

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Then I changed the first line into this #!/usr/bin/perl -apn

and run the program like this
 perl -F"monkey" test.pl
This gave me this output from Data::Dumper.

$VAR1 = [
          'my ',
          '
'
        ];

[download]
What am I doing wrong?
--
Pug

In reply to Having an issue with -F by Pug

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