I see my "reputation" points are going into the negative whenever I reply to postings with mere reports that the advice I'm being given isn't working. Am I doing something anti-social? :-)

Of course not, since what you write has nothing to do with social issues. And it's not your reputation that decreases, but the node's, even if that might involve loss of XP to you (which really isn't diminishing your reputation either :-).It's a sad fact that downvotes generally aren't accompanied by an explanation. I would like to see stated within the monastery guidelines that downvoting should be accompanied by a node or a private /msg to the author of the downvoted node, whenever possible.

It lies in the nature of approval and dissent, that approval is rarely questioned, but dissent is. If downvoting is a corrective, and meant to incite the poster of the downvoted node to rethink the contents of their post, I deem it a good practice to give the OP a hint of what is deeemed wrong with their post.

Back to the issue at hand: the overall picture is still not clear to me. You have a setuid binary that allows you to invoke perl with some file as argument. What beast is that binary? is it some shell? what permission bits are set for that binary, what bits are set for the perl file, or the link that points to it? what's in the perl script being invoked? What OS do you have, which perl version?

I can't reproduce the problem with the information at hand. Or maybe I'm just not trying hard enough.

--shmem

update: strike through

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