As moritz pointed out, BEGIN blocks are executed at compile time, so the rest of the file is not known at that time. So, no __DATA__ token has been seen yet, and its filehandle can't be opened.

If you absolutely need __DATA__ in a BEGIN block, you have to roll your own __DATA__ handling (opening and positioning, i.e. skipping all until the __DATA__ token):

package Foo::Bar::Quux; print "now in runtime...\n"; BEGIN { (my $package = __PACKAGE__) =~ s!::!/!g; my $file = $INC{$package.'.pm'}; open DATA , '<', $file or die "Can't open '$file': $!\n"; my $data = 0; while (<DATA>) { /^__DATA__$/ and $data = 1 and next; next unless $data; print "DATA: $_"; }; } 1; __DATA__ foo bar quux now in runtime... now in main
qwurx [shmem] ~ > perl -e 'print "now in main\n"; use Foo::Bar::Quux' DATA: foo DATA: bar DATA: quux now in runtime...

That's for a module. In a script, you would open $0.

--shmem

_($_=" "x(1<<5)."?\n".q·/)Oo.  G°\        /
                              /\_¯/(q    /
----------------------------  \__(m.====·.(_("always off the crowd"))."·
");sub _{s./.($e="'Itrs `mnsgdq Gdbj O`qkdq")=~y/"-y/#-z/;$e.e && print}

In reply to Re: __DATA__ used in BEGIN by shmem
in thread __DATA__ used in BEGIN by Tabari

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