Problem with perl interpreter

funkymonkey has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I know this kind of deals maybe not so much with perl fully, but more of the system. However, I am asking this question in hope that someone has had this problem before.

On my system running perl v5.8.3 I have come across an odd problem:

The script in question:

$ ./test1.pl

: bad interpreter: No such file or directory

The second script that works:

$ ./test2.pl

Usage: do this, do that.

Now, both of the scripts both include #!/usr/bin/perl in the beginning of the script. They also are set with the same permissions and everything. What could be this problem, I know it doesn't deal with perl coding, however, once again, I was just wondering if maybe someone has run into this problem before.

Help would be appreciated, thanks!

Comment on Problem with perl interpreter

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Re: Problem with perl interpretor by saskaqueer (Friar) on Jan 09, 2005 at 04:54 UTC
You've most likely got an issue with your line endings. What would be happening is that you've got a carriage return at the end of the first line, so *nix is looking for a binary at "/usr/bin/perl\r" instead of the correct "/usr/bin/perl". Try running this one-liner on the file by replacing 'foobar.qux' with the name of your file, and then try running the perl script again. `$ perl -pi -e 's/\r\n/\n/;' foobar.qux` [download]	[reply] [d/l]
Re^2: Problem with perl interpretor by funkymonkey (Initiate) on Jan 09, 2005 at 05:07 UTC
Worked great. Thanks! Since I didn't it locally on the system, must have somehow grabbed a carriage return when transfering it from the jumpdrive to the disk. Thanks again.	[reply]
Re: Problem with perl interpreter by brian_d_foy (Abbot) on Jan 09, 2005 at 06:50 UTC
This is answered in perlfaq7: What does "bad interpreter" mean. From the command line, you can get to the answer with: `perldoc -q bad interpreter` [download] -- brian d foy <bdfoy@cpan.org>	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Problem with perl interpreter by vek (Prior) on Jan 09, 2005 at 07:25 UTC
Other monks have given you some good advice about line endings but I've seen the 'bad interpreter' message reported by the bash shell on a Solaris box - it was purely a permissions problem: `$ ls -l foo.pl -rw-r--r-- 1 user group 44 Jan 9 00:05 foo.pl $ ./foo.pl bash: ./foo.pl: bad interpreter: Permission denied $ chmod 755 foo.pl $ ls -l foo.pl $ -rwxr-xr-x 1 user group 44 Jan 9 00:16 foo.pl $ ./foo.pl $ Hello World $` [download] -- vek --	[reply] [d/l]