$code .= ";\n1;";
# ... ?
my $perl = qx/ which perl /;
my $result = qx/ perl -c $code /; # CAN this work? If so, how? I'm a s
+hell-tard.
[download]

Yes, it can. The my $perl = qx/ which perl / is somewhat pointless, since your are already running perl, so how you've invoked it is in $^X.

my $result = qx/perl -c -e '$code' 2>&1/; # bundle STDOUT and STDERR
[download]

should give you either

-e syntax OK
[download]

or any error which you can then examine. For simple snippets without quotes, that is! Otherwise you'd grab File::Temp, write a tempfile and examine

my $result = qx/perl -c $tempfile 2>&1/;
[download]

update:

WRT evaling - you could switch to some other package before the eval

package My::Eval::Evil;
eval $code;
if ($@) {
    ....
}
package main; # or whatever package you've been in
[download]

and then throw away the symbol tables for My::Eval::Evil and the eval'ed code's package. That reduces the risk of name space pollution a bit. But the eval'ed code could still reach into your package (via examining %INC or writing into *main::), so the safest (for some value of safety) is writing a tempfile and shell out a brand new perl.

perl -e 'sub foo {print "foo\n" } package Foo; my $code = "*main::foo 
+= sub {print \"bar\\n\" }"; eval $code; package main; foo()'
bar
[download]