You cut off a relevant part of the error message: "or string". You have a string literal (<<EOF .. EOF) which interpolates an undefined variable. $email_400, $main_domain, $ENV{REDIRECT_URL} or $ENV{HTTP_REFERER} evaluates to undef. A more recent version of Perl would actually identify which in the error message.

Possibly relates to the opening lines of the script</>

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
my ($email_400, $email_500, $unfriendly_error, $redirect_to);
my $main_domain=getpwuid($<);
my @sendmail_path=(qw(/usr/sbin/sendmail -i -odb), "-fdcm\@nineone.org
+");

## Uncomment the below two lines to get emailed regarding the respecti
+ve
## errors.

$email_400="dcm\@$main_domain";
$email_500="dcm\@$main_domain";
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should I give the whole script - 110 lines?

should I give the whole script - 110 lines?

Why? The warning has already been explained. (I was going to say your question has already been answered, but you have yet to actually ask a question.)

I presume you want to know which variable isn't defined and why, but that's simple debugging. You can use defined to determine which variable isn't defined. To find out why it isn't defined, find out where the variable is getting set (if it's getting set at all) and find out when the initialiser might be undefined.

Before building the email message, check all variables and perform appropriate actions if they aren't set or don't have suitable values. Those actions might be to call an error handling routine, output a warning message, supply a default value and so on.

You might also consider building the components of the message separately. For instance:

if ($email_400) {
    my $problem_description = $ENV{REDIRECT_URL}
        ? "A request was received for the file $ENV{REDIRECT_URL}, whi
+ch does not exist."
        : "A file request was received but no filename was supplied.";
    send_mail(...
    ...
    $problem_description
    ...
EOF
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Thanks for those two responses. I shall have to carry on tomorrow pm Gilbert

if($email_400) {
  my $email_content = <<EOF;
To: $email_400
..
..
EOF
  send_mail($email_400,$email_content);
}
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A here document start marker needs a semicolon directly after the here document name (EOF in this case) afaik.

No, other stuff can follow the marker if required. I often use this to inline data in a HEREDOC and open it as if it was a file.

knoppix@Microknoppix:~$ perl -Mstrict -we '
> open my $fh, q{<}, \ <<EOD or die qq{open: < HEREDOC: $!\n};
> line 1
> line 2
> line 3
> EOD
> 
> while ( <$fh> )
> {
>     $_ = ucfirst;
>     print;
> }
> 
> close $fh or die $!;'
Line 1
Line 2
Line 3
knoppix@Microknoppix:~$
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I hope this is of interest.

Cheers,

JohnGG

thanks JohnGG, that's interesting...i must be getting old now if i'm forgetting stuff from the manual...where's a lake so i can do fishing instead?
r u really running on a knoppix?..on a mobile device?
the hardest line to type correctly is: stty erase ^H