Hmm... welp, the reason I was not seeing eval doing what I expected was because I was doing this:

eval { $line };
[download]

not this:

eval $line;
[download]

And I wholeheartedly agree... doing it this way is stupid. It was just the first thing I thought of, and got grumpy when things weren't behaving as I expected. eval EXPR != eval BLOCK. Right.

Thanks for the assists...