I have no explanation for you. It is too long ago for me to remember making the post; though I remembered posting the over expanded version, hence referencing it in the new thread.

I didn't think I would have posted it if it didn't work; but I've just tried it on the oldest Perl I have still kicking around -- 5.8.6 -- and get exactly the same compilation errors as I do for my current build; which strongly suggests it never did worked.

This does work:

E:\test>c:\DELL\bin\perl5.8.6.exe -e"BEGIN{ open $fh[$_],'>','split.'.
+$_ for 0..9 }" -nle"print {$fh[substr $_,3,1]} $_" junk.log

E:\test>dir
 Volume in drive E is New Volume
 Volume Serial Number is 1821-B83A

 Directory of E:\test

28/01/2015  02:20    <DIR>          .
28/01/2015  02:20    <DIR>          ..
28/01/2015  02:13             1,900 junk.log
28/01/2015  02:20               190 split.0
28/01/2015  02:20               190 split.1
28/01/2015  02:20               190 split.2
28/01/2015  02:20               190 split.3
28/01/2015  02:20               190 split.4
28/01/2015  02:20               190 split.5
28/01/2015  02:20               190 split.6
28/01/2015  02:20               190 split.7
28/01/2015  02:20               190 split.8
28/01/2015  02:20               190 split.9
              11 File(s)          3,800 bytes
               2 Dir(s)  1,624,181,084,160 bytes free
[download]

Though as you suggested, using 2 -e's is unnecessary.

My best guess is that I was trying to work around the 70 character code section wrap point when posting; and thought splitting the command into an -e and an -nle would achieve the desired affect; but never actually tried it.

Update:FWIW, IMO, the fact that an -e, that precedes an -nle, gets amalgamated into the latter's loop; is a bug.