The -e switch tells perl to treat the next argument on the command line as a script.

The __DATA__ token causes perl to re-open $0, seek to the position of the __DATA__ and leave the filehandle DATA open pointing to the contents after that line. 

$ perl -le 'print $0'
-e

[download]
I'm not surprised a file handle cannot be associated with text passed into perl as a command line argument. -e is no file proper.

Maybe you could use 

$ perl -e 'print <<EOT;
example
data
EOT
'

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instead.

--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: 'perl -e' and '__DATA__' What's wrong? by shmem
in thread 'perl -e' and '__DATA__' What's wrong? by Skeeve

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