Andreas' coworker here!

The strange thing is that once this error occurs, evals that previously worked all of a sudden fail. Some of the code that is evaled is in fact logged to file (under /tmp), and they are valid:

username@server tmp$ /opt/perl/bin/perl -c /tmp/agent_code.4561.pl 
/tmp/agent_code.4561.pl syntax OK

This is code that works for days, and works again after a restart of the application (which of course means we get a fresh interpreter to mess up)