FAQ 7.30 What does "bad interpreter" mean?

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7.30: What does "bad interpreter" mean?

(contributed by brian d foy)

The "bad interpreter" message comes from the shell, not perl. The actual
message may vary depending on your platform, shell, and locale settings.

If you see "bad interpreter - no such file or directory", the first line
in your perl script (the "shebang" line) does not contain the right path
to perl (or any other program capable of running scripts). Sometimes
this happens when you move the script from one machine to another and
each machine has a different path to perl--/usr/bin/perl versus
/usr/local/bin/perl for instance. It may also indicate that the source
machine has CRLF line terminators and the destination machine has LF
only: the shell tries to find /usr/bin/perl<CR>, but can't.

If you see "bad interpreter: Permission denied", you need to make your
script executable.

In either case, you should still be able to run the scripts with perl
explicitly:

% perl script.pl

If you get a message like "perl: command not found", perl is not in your
PATH, which might also mean that the location of perl is not where you
expect it so you need to adjust your shebang line.



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