Well, one problem is that you are first calling GetOptions, and then asking that @ARGV not be empty... however, the way that GetOptions works is to remove values from @ARGV. So if all that is contained in @ARGV are -options, then after GetOptions, they'll have all been removed from @ARGV, and @ARGV will be empty.

Another problem (that isn't with your Getopt::Long), is with your shell scripting. If you want to pass all arguments through to a command in a shell script, it's done like:

command "$@"
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rather than

command $*
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The difference can be demonstrated if you just take this simple shell script (lets call it "test.sh"):

#!/bin/sh
perl -e "use Data::Dumper; print Dumper \@ARGV" $*
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and call it with some arguments that will demonstrate why this breaks:

[sstone@ernie1 scratch]$ sh test.sh 1 2 "3 and more stuff"
$VAR1 = [
          1,
          2,
          3,
          'and',
          'more',
          'stuff'
        ];
[sstone@ernie1 scratch]$
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but if we change test.sh to:

#!/bin/sh
perl -e "use Data::Dumper; print Dumper \@ARGV" "$@"
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and run it the same way:

[sstone@ernie1 scratch]$ sh test.sh 1 2 "3 and more stuff"
$VAR1 = [
          1,
          2,
          '3 and more stuff'
        ];
[sstone@ernie1 scratch]$
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The difference being that "$@" will preserve the arg list as a list, whereas $* will flatten it all into a string (basically just like join(" ",@ARGV)), and then split it on whitespace... so if you had args with whitespace in them it would get all messed up.

At the very least, that's a couple of things that might be causing you problems.