First of all, it's not an issue of being familiar with eval or exec .. I know what those do, it's the some of the crazy syntax/variables it's trying to use in ways that make no sense.

Second, bash most certainly has an "eval" see the "SHELL BUILTIN COMMANDS" section of "man bash"

Third, reading RedHat bug#82652 indicates a couple of important things:

• /etc/rc.d/init.d/hpoj is evidently a symlink to /usr/sbin/ptal-init
• The lines you quoted seem to come from a patch attached to ALEXANDRE's comment#7
• The same ALEXANDRE submitted another patch with comment#8 indicating that her first patch: "...isn't even correct perl."

I would read the rest of that bug, and take a look at the most recent release of your software.

---

---

Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!

Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.

Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.

Please read these before you post! —

• How do I compose an effective node title?
• How do I post a question effectively?
• Markup in the Monastery

Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:

a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr

You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)

	For:		Use:
	&		&
	<		&lt;
	>		&gt;
	[		&#91;
	]		&#93;

Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?

See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.