These messages are classified as follows (listed in increasing order of desperation):
Class | Meaning |
---|---|
(W) | A warning (optional) |
(D) | A deprecation (optional) |
(S) | A severe warning (mandatory) |
(F) | A fatal error (trappable) |
(P) | An internal error (panic) that you should never see (trappable) |
(X) | A very fatal error (nontrappable) |
(A) | An alien error message (not generated by Perl) |
The majority of messages from the first three
classifications above (W, D, and S) can be controlled using the
warnings
pragma or the -w
and
-W
switches. If a message can be controlled by
the warnings
pragma, its warning category is given
after the classification letter; for example, (W misc) indicates a
miscellaneous warning. The warnings
pragma is
described in Chapter 31.
Warnings may be captured rather than printed by setting
$SIG{__WARN__}
to a reference to a routine that will
be called on each warning. You can also capture control before a
trappable error "dies" by setting $SIG{__DIE__}
to a
subroutine reference, but if you don't call die
within the handler, the exception is still thrown when you return from
it. In other words, you're not allowed to "de-fatalize" an exception
that way. You must use eval
for that.
Default warnings are always enabled unless they are explicitly
disabled with the warnings
pragma or the
-X
switch.
In the following messages, %s
stands
for an interpolated string that is determined only when the message is
generated. (Similarly, %d
stands for an
interpolated number--think printf
formats, but we use
%d
to mean a number in any base here.) Note
that some messages begin with
%s
--which means that listing them
alphabetically is problematical. You should search among these messages
if the one you are looking for does not appear in the expected place.
The symbols "%-?@
sort before alphabetic characters,
while [
and sort after.
If you decide a bug is a Perl bug and not your bug, you should try to reduce it to a minimal test case and then report it with the perlbug program that comes with Perl.
%s
" variable
%s
masks earlier declaration in
same
%s
(W misc) A my
or our
variable has been redeclared in the current scope or statement,
effectively eliminating all access to the previous instance. This
is almost always a typographical error. Note that the earlier
variable will still exist until the end of the scope or until all
closure referents to it are destroyed.
my sub" not yet implemented
(F) Lexically scoped subroutines are not yet implemented. Don't try that yet.
my" variable
%s
can't be in a package
(F) Lexically scoped variables aren't in a package, so it
doesn't make sense to try to declare one with a package qualifier
in front. Use local
if you want to localize a
package variable.
no" not allowed in expression
(F) The no
keyword is recognized and
executed at compile time and returns no useful value.
our" variable
%s
redeclared
(W misc) You seem to have already declared the same global once before in the current lexical scope.
use" not allowed in expression
(F) The use
keyword is recognized and
executed at compile time and returns no useful value.
!' allowed only after types
%s
(F) The '!
' is allowed in
pack
and unpack
only after
certain types.
|' and '<' may not both be specified on command
line
(F) This is an error peculiar to VMS. Perl does its own
command-line redirection. It found that STDIN
was a pipe and that you also tried to redirect
STDIN
using <
. Only one
STDIN
stream to a customer, please.
|' and '>' may not both be specified on command
line
(F) This is an error peculiar to VMS. Perl does its own
command-line redirection and thinks you tried to redirect
STDOUT
both to a file and into a pipe to
another command. You need to choose one or the other, though
nothing's stopping you from piping into a program or Perl script
that splits the output into two streams, such as:
open(OUT,">$ARGV[0]") or die "Can't write to $ARGV[0]: $!"; while (<STDIN>) { print; print OUT; } close OUT;
/ cannot take a count
(F) You had an unpack
template indicating
a counted-length string, but you have also specified an explicit
size for the string.
/ must be followed by a, A, or Z
(F) You had an unpack
template indicating
a counted-length string, which must be followed by one of the
letters a
, A
or
Z
to indicate what sort of string is to be
unpacked.
/ must be followed by a*, A*, or Z*
(F) You had a pack template indicating a counted-length
string. Currently, the only things that can have their length
counted are a*
, A*
or
Z*
.
/ must follow a numeric type
(F) You had an unpack
template that
contained a #
, but this did not follow some
numeric unpack
specification.
% may only be used in unpack
(F) You can't pack
a string by supplying
a checksum, because the checksumming process loses information,
and you can't go the other way.
Repeat count in pack overflows
(F) You can't specify a repeat count so large that it overflows your signed integers.
Repeat count in unpack overflows
(F) You can't specify a repeat count so large that it overflows your signed integers.
/
%s
/:
Unrecognized escape \%c
passed
through
(W regexp) You used a backslash-character combination that is not recognized by Perl. This combination appears in an interpolated variable or a '-delimited regular expression. The character was understood literally.
/
%s
/:
Unrecognized escape \%c
in character
class passed through
(W regexp) You used a backslash-character combination that is not recognized by Perl inside character classes. The character was understood literally.
/
%s
/
should probably be written as
"%s
"(W syntax) You have used a pattern where Perl expected to
find a string, as in the first argument to
join
. Perl will treat the true or false result
of matching the pattern against $_
as the
string, which is probably not what you had in mind.
%s
(…) interpreted as
function
(W syntax) You've run afoul of the rule that says that any list operator followed by parentheses turns into a function, with all the list operators arguments found inside the parentheses.
%s
() called too early to
check prototype
(W prototype) You've called a function that has a prototype before the parser saw a definition or declaration for it, and Perl could not check that the call conforms to the prototype. You need to either add an early prototype declaration for the subroutine in question, or move the subroutine definition ahead of the call to get proper prototype checking. Alternatively, if you are certain that you're calling the function correctly, you may put an ampersand before the name to avoid the warning.
%s
argument is not a HASH
or ARRAY element
(F) The argument to exists
must be a hash
or array element, such as:
$foo{$bar} $ref->{"susie"}[12]
%s
argument is not a HASH
or ARRAY element or slice
(F) The argument to delete
must be either
a hash or array element, such as:
$foo{$bar} $ref->{"susie"}[12]
or a hash or array slice, such as:
@foo[$bar, $baz, $xyzzy] @{$ref->[12]}{"susie", "queue"}
%s
argument is not a
subroutine name
(F) The argument to exists
for
exists &sub
must be a subroutine name, and
not a subroutine call. exists &sub()
will
generate this error.
%s
did not return a true
value
(F) A require
d (or
use
d) file must return a true value to indicate
that it compiled correctly and ran its initialization code
correctly. It's traditional to end such a file with a
1;
, though any true value would do.
%s
found where operator
expected
(S) The Perl lexer knows whether to expect a term or an operator. If it sees what it knows to be a term when it was expecting to see an operator, it gives you this warning. Usually it indicates that an operator or delimiter was omitted, such as a semicolon.
%s
had compilation
errors
(F) The final summary message when a perl -c fails.
%s
has too many
errors
(F) The parser has given up trying to parse the program after 10 errors. Further error messages would likely be uninformative.
%s
matches null string
many times
(W regexp) The pattern you've specified would be an infinite loop if the regular expression engine didn't specifically check for that.
%s
never
introduced
(S internal) The symbol in question was declared but somehow went out of scope before it could possibly have been used.
%s
package attribute may
clash with future reserved word
:
%s
(W reserved) A lowercase attribute name was used that had a package-specific handler. That name might have a meaning to Perl itself some day, even though it doesn't yet. Perhaps you should use a mixed-case attribute name, instead.
%s
syntax
OK
(F) The final summary message when a perl -c succeeds.
%s
: Command not
found
(A) You've accidentally run your script through
csh instead of Perl. Check the
#!
line, or manually feed your script into Perl
yourself with perl scriptname.
%s
: Expression
syntax
(A) You've accidentally run your script through
csh instead of Perl. Check the
#!
line, or manually feed your script into Perl
yourself with perl scriptname.
%s
: Undefined
variable
(A) You've accidentally run your script through
csh instead of Perl. Check the
#!
line, or manually feed your script into Perl
yourself with perl scriptname.
%s
: not
found
(A) You've accidentally run your script through the Bourne
shell instead of Perl. Check the #!
line, or
manually feed your script Perl yourself with perl
scriptname.
(in cleanup)
%s
(W misc) This prefix usually indicates that a
DESTROY
method raised the indicated exception.
Since destructors are usually called by the system at arbitrary
points during execution, and often a vast number of times, the
warning is issued only once for any number of failures that would
otherwise result in the same message being repeated.
Failure of user callbacks dispatched using the
G_KEEPERR
flag could also result in this
warning. See perlcall (1).
(Missing semicolon on previous
line?)
(S) This is an educated guess made in conjunction with the
message "%s
found where
operator expected
." Don't automatically put a semicolon
on the previous line just because you saw this message.
-P not allowed for setuid/setgid
script
(F) The script would have to be opened by the C preprocessor by name, which provides a race condition that breaks security.
-T and -B not implemented on
filehandles
(F) Perl can't peek at the standard I/O buffer of filehandles when it doesn't know about your kind of standard I/O. You'll have to use a filename instead.
-p destination
:
%s
(F) An error occurred during the implicit output invoked by
the -p
command-line switch. (This output
goes to STDOUT
unless you've redirected it with
select
.)
500 Server error
See Server error
.
?+* follows nothing in regexp
(F) You started a regular expression with a quantifier. Backslash it if you meant it literally.
@ outside of string
(F) You had a pack template that specified an absolute position outside the string being unpacked.
<> should be quotes
(F) You wrote require <file>
when
you should have written require 'file
'.
1 better written as $1
(W syntax) Outside of patterns, backreferences live on as variables. The use of backslashes is grandfathered on the righthand side of a substitution, but stylistically it's better to use the variable form because other Perl programmers will expect it, and it works better if there are more than nine backreferences.
accept() on closed socket
%s
(W closed) You tried to do an accept on a closed socket. Did
you forget to check the return value of your
socket
call?
Allocation too large: %lx
(X) You can't allocate more than 64K on an MS-DOS machine.
Applying
%s
to
%s
will
act on
scalar(
%s
)
(W misc) The pattern match (//
),
substitution (s///
), and transliteration
(tr///
) operators work on scalar values. If you
apply one of them to an array or a hash, it will convert the array
or hash to a scalar value--the length of an array or the
population info of a hash--and then work on that scalar value.
This is probably not what you meant to do.
Arg too short for msgsnd
(F) msgsnd
requires a string at least as
long as sizeof(long)
.
Ambiguous use of
%s
resolved as
%s
(W ambiguous|S) You said something that may not be interpreted the way you thought. Normally it's pretty easy to disambiguate it by supplying a missing quote, operator, pair of parentheses, or declaration.
Ambiguous call resolved as
CORE:
:%s
(), qualify as
such or use &
(W ambiguous) A subroutine you have declared has the same name as a Perl keyword, and you have used the name without qualification for calling one or the other. Perl decided to call the built-in because the subroutine is not imported.
To force interpretation as a subroutine call, either put an
ampersand before the subroutine name or qualify the name with its
package. Alternatively, you can import the subroutine (or pretend
that it's imported with the use subs
pragma).
To silently interpret it as the Perl operator, use the
CORE:
: prefix on the operator (e.g.,
CORE::log($x)
) or declare the subroutine to be
an object method.
Args must match #! line
(F) The setuid emulator requires that the arguments Perl was
invoked with match the arguments specified on the
#!
line. Since some systems impose a
one-argument limit on the #!
line, try
combining switches; for example, turn -w -U
into -wU
.
Argument
"%s
" isn't
numeric
(W numeric) The indicated string was fed as an argument to an operator that expected a numeric value instead. If you're fortunate, the message will identify which operator was so unfortunate.
Array @
%s
missing the @ in argument
%d
of
%s
()
(D deprecated) Really old Perls let you omit the
@
on array names in some spots. This is now
heavily deprecated.
assertion botched
:
%s
(P) The malloc
package that comes with
Perl had an internal failure.
Assertion failed: file
"%s
"(P) A general assertion failed. The file in question must be examined.
Assignment to both a list and a
scalar
(F) If you assign to a conditional operator, the second and third arguments must either both be scalars or both be lists. Otherwise, Perl won't know which context to supply to the right side.
Attempt to free non-arena SV: 0x%lx
(P internal) All SV objects are supposed to be allocated from arenas that will be garbage collected on exit. An SV was discovered to be outside any of those arenas.
Attempt to free nonexistent shared
string
(P internal) Perl maintains a reference-counted internal table of strings to optimize the storage and access of hash keys and other strings. This message indicates that someone tried to decrement the reference count of a string that can no longer be found in the table.
Attempt to free temp prematurely
(W debugging) Mortalized values are supposed to be freed by
the internal free_tmps
routine. This message
indicates that something else is freeing the SV before the
free_tmps
routine gets a chance, which means
that the free_tmps
routine will be freeing an
unreferenced scalar when it does try to free it.
Attempt to free unreferenced glob
pointers
(P internal) The reference counts got screwed up on symbol aliases.
Attempt to free unreferenced scalar
(W internal) Perl went to decrement the reference count of a
scalar to see if it would go to 0, and discovered that it had
already gone to 0 earlier and should have been freed and, in fact,
probably was freed. This could indicate that
SvREFCNT_dec
was called too many times, or that
SvREFCNT_inc
was called too few times, or that
the SV was mortalized when it shouldn't have been, or that memory
has been corrupted.
Attempt to join self
(F) You tried to join a thread from within itself, which is
an impossible task. You may be joining the wrong thread, or you
may need to move the join
to some other
thread.
Attempt to pack pointer to temporary
value
(W pack) You tried to pass a temporary value (like the
result of a function, or a computed expression) to the
p
template of pack
template.
This means the result contains a pointer to a location that could
become invalid anytime, even before the end of the current
statement. Use literals or global values as arguments to the
p
template of pack
to avoid
this warning.
Attempt to use reference as lvalue in
substr
(W substr) You supplied a reference as the first argument to
substr
used as an lvalue, which is pretty
strange. Perhaps you forgot to dereference it first.
Bad arg length for
%s
, is
%d
, should be
%d
(F) You passed a buffer of the wrong size to one of
msgctl
, semctl
or
shmctl
. In C parlance, the correct sizes are,
respectively, sizeof(struct msqid_ds *)
,
sizeof(struct semid_ds *)
, and
sizeof(struct shmid_ds *)
.
Bad filehandle
:
%s
(F) A symbol was passed to something wanting a filehandle,
but the symbol has no filehandle associated with it. Perhaps you
didn't do an open
, or did it in another
package.
Bad free() ignored
(S malloc) An internal routine called
free
on something that had never been
malloc
ed in the first place. Mandatory, but can
be disabled by setting environment variable
PERL_BADFREE
to 1.
This message can be seen quite often with
DB_File
on systems with "hard" dynamic linking,
like AIX and OS/2. It's a bug in Berkeley DB.
Bad hash
(P) One of the internal hash routines was passed a null HV pointer.
Bad index while coercing array into
hash
(F) The index looked up in the hash found as the 0th element of a pseudohash is not legal. Index values must be 1 or greater.
Bad name after
%s
:
:(F) You started to name a symbol by using a package prefix and then didn't finish the symbol. In particular, you can't interpolate outside of quotes, so:
$var = 'myvar'; $sym = mypack::$var;
is not the same as:
$var = 'myvar'; $sym = "mypack::$var";
Bad realloc() ignored
(S malloc) An internal routine called
realloc
on something that had never been
malloc
ed in the first place. Mandatory, but can
be disabled by setting environment variable
PERL_BADFREE
to 1.
Bad symbol for array
(P) An internal request asked to add an array entry to something that wasn't a symbol table entry.
Bad symbol for filehandle
(P) An internal request asked to add a filehandle entry to something that wasn't a symbol table entry.
Bad symbol for hash
(P) An internal request asked to add a hash entry to something that wasn't a symbol table entry.
Badly placed ()'s
(A) You've accidentally run your script through
csh instead of Perl. Check the
#!
line, or manually feed your script into Perl
yourself with perl scriptname.
Bareword
"%s
" not allowed while
"strict subs" in use
(F) With strict subs
in use, a bareword
is only allowed as a subroutine identifier, in curly brackets or
to the left of the =>
symbol. Perhaps you
need to predeclare a subroutine?
Bareword
"%s
" refers to
nonexistent package
(W bareword) You used a qualified bareword of the form
Foo:
:, but the compiler saw no other uses of
that namespace before that point. Perhaps you need to predeclare a
package?
Bareword found in conditional
(W bareword) The compiler found a bareword where it expected
a conditional, which often indicates that an ||
or &&
was parsed as part of the last
argument of the previous construct, for example:
open FOO || die;
It may also indicate a misspelled constant that has been interpreted as a bareword:
use constant TYPO => 1; if (TYOP) { print "foo" }
The strict
pragma is useful in avoiding
such errors.
BEGIN failed--compilation aborted
(F) An untrapped exception was raised while executing a
BEGIN
subroutine. Compilation stops immediately
and the interpreter is exited.
BEGIN not safe after errors--compilation
aborted
(F) Perl found a BEGIN
subroutine (or a
use
directive, which implies a
BEGIN
) after one or more compilation errors had
already occurred. Since the intended environment for the
BEGIN
could not be guaranteed (due to the
errors), and since subsequent code likely depends on its correct
operation, Perl just gave up.
Binary number > 0b11111111111111111111111111111111
non-portable
(W portable) The binary number you specified is larger than
2**32-1
(4,294,967,295) and therefore
nonportable between systems.
bind() on closed socket
%s
(W closed) You tried to do a bind
on a
closed socket. Did you forget to check the return value of your
socket
call?
Bit vector size > 32 non-portable
(W portable) Using bit vector sizes larger than 32 is nonportable.
Bizarre copy of
%s
in
%s
(P) Perl detected an attempt to copy an internal value that is not copiable.
Buffer overflow in prime_env_iter
:
%s
(W internal) A warning peculiar to VMS. While Perl was
preparing to iterate over %ENV
, it encountered
a logical name or symbol definition which was too long, so it was
truncated to the string shown.
Callback called exit
(F) A subroutine invoked from an external package via
call_sv
exited by calling
exit
.
Can't "goto" out of a pseudo block
(F) A goto
statement was executed to jump
out of what might look like a block, except that it isn't a proper
block. This usually occurs if you tried to jump out of a sort
block or subroutine, which is a no-no.
Can't "goto" into the middle of a foreach
loop
(F) A goto
statement was executed to jump
into the middle of a foreach loop. You can't get there from
here.
Can't "last" outside a loop block
(F) A last
statement was executed to
break out of the current block, except that there's this
itty-bitty problem called there isn't a current block. Note that
an if
or else
block doesn't
count as a "loopish" block, nor does a block given to
sort
, map
, or
grep
. You can usually double the curlies to get
the same effect, though, because the inner curlies will be
considered a block that loops once.
Can't "next" outside a loop block
(F) A next
statement was executed to
reiterate the current block, but there isn't a current block. Note
that an if
or else
block
doesn't count as a "loopish" block, nor does a block given to
sort
, map
, or
grep
. You can usually double the curlies to get
the same effect though, because the inner curlies will be
considered a block that loops once.
Can't read CRTL environ
(S) This is a warning peculiar to VMS. Perl tried to read an
element of %ENV
from the CRTL's internal
environment array and discovered the array was missing. You need
to figure out where your CRTL misplaced its environ or define
PERL_ENV_TABLES
(see
perlvms (1)) so that the environ
array is not searched.
Can't "redo" outside a loop block
(F) A redo
statement was executed to
restart the current block, but there isn't a current block. Note
that an if
or else
block
doesn't count as a "loopish" block, nor does a block given to
sort
, map
, or
grep
. You can usually double the curlies to get
the same effect though, because the inner curlies will be
considered a block that loops once.
Can't bless non-reference value
(F) Only hard references may be blessed. This is how Perl "enforces" encapsulation of objects.
Can't break at that line
(S internal) This warning is intended to be printed only while running within the debugger, indicating the line number specified wasn't the location of a statement that could be stopped at.
Can't call method
"%s
" in empty package
"%s
"(F) You called a method correctly, and it correctly indicated a package functioning as a class, but that package doesn't have anything defined in it, let alone methods.
Can't call method
"%s
" on unblessed
reference
(F) A method call must know in what package it's supposed to run. It ordinarily finds this out from the object reference you supply, but you didn't supply an object reference in this case. A reference isn't an object reference until it has been blessed.
Can't call method
"%s
" without a package
or object reference
(F) You used the syntax of a method call, but the slot filled by the object reference or package name contains an expression that returns a defined value that is neither an object reference nor a package name. Something like this will reproduce the error:
$BADREF = 42; process $BADREF 1,2,3; $BADREF->process(1,2,3);
Can't call method
"%s
" on an undefined
value
(F) You used the syntax of a method call, but the slot filled by the object reference or package name contains an undefined value. Something like this will reproduce the error:
$BADREF = undef; process $BADREF 1,2,3; $BADREF->process(1,2,3);
Can't chdir to
%s
(F) You called perl -x/foo/bar, but
/foo/bar is not a directory that you can
chdir
to, possibly because it doesn't
exist.
Can't check filesystem of script
"%s
" for
nosuid
(P) For some reason you can't check the filesystem of the
script for nosuid
.
Can't coerce
%s
to integer in
%s
(F) Certain types of SVs, in particular symbol table entries (typeglobs), can't be forced to stop being what they are. So you can't say things like:
*foo += 1;
You can say:
$foo = *foo; $foo += 1;
but then $foo
no longer contains a
glob.
Can't coerce
%s
to number in
%s
(F) Certain types of SVs, in particular symbol table entries (typeglobs), can't be forced to stop being what they are.
Can't coerce
%s
to string in
%s
(F) Certain types of SVs, in particular symbol table entries (typeglobs), can't be forced to stop being what they are.
Can't coerce array into hash
(F) You used an array where a hash was expected, but the array has no information on how to map from keys to array indices. You can do that only with arrays that have a hash reference at index 0.
Can't create pipe mailbox
(P) This is an error peculiar to VMS. The process is suffering from exhausted quotas or other plumbing problems.
Can't declare class for non-scalar
%s
in
"%s
"(S) Currently, only scalar variables can declared with a
specific class qualifier in a my
or
our
declaration. The semantics may be extended
for other types of variables in future.
Can't declare
%s
in
"%s
"(F) Only scalar, array, and hash variables may be declared
as my
or our
variables. They
must have ordinary identifiers as names.
Can't do inplace edit on
%s
: %s
(S inplace) The creation of the new file failed for the indicated reason.
Can't do inplace edit without backup
(F) You're on a system such as MS-DOS that gets confused if you try reading from a deleted (but still opened) file. You have to say -i.bak, or some such.
Can't do inplace edit
:
%s
would not be
unique
(S inplace) Your filesystem does not support filenames
longer than 14 characters and Perl was unable to create a unique
filename during inplace editing with the -i
switch. The file was ignored.
Can't do inplace edit
:
%s
is not a regular
file
(S inplace) You tried to use the -i
switch on a special file, such as a file in
/dev, or a FIFO. The file was ignored.
Can't do setegid!
(P) The setegid
call failed for some
reason in the setuid emulator of
suidperl.
Can't do seteuid!
(P) The setuid emulator of suidperl failed for some reason.
Can't do setuid
(F) This typically means that ordinary
perl tried to exec
suidperl to do setuid emulation, but couldn't
exec
it. It looks for a name of the form
sperl5.000 in the same directory that the
perl executable resides under the name
perl5.000, typically
/usr/local/bin on Unix machines. If the file
is there, check the execute permissions. If it isn't, ask your
sysadmin why not.
Can't do waitpid with flags
(F) This machine doesn't have either
waitpid
or wait4
, so only
waitpid
without flags is emulated.
Can't do {n,m} with n > m
(F) Minima must be less than or equal to maxima. If you
really want your regexp to match something 0 times, just use
{0}
.
Can't emulate
-
%s
on #!
line
(F) The #!
line specifies a switch that
doesn't make sense at this point. For example, it would be kind of
silly to put a -x
on the
#!
line.
Can't exec
"%s
":
%s
(W exec) A system
,
exec
, or piped open
call
could not execute the named program for the indicated reason.
Typical reasons include the permissions were wrong on the file,
the file wasn't found in $ENV{PATH}
, the
executable in question was compiled for another architecture, or
the #!
line in a script points to an
interpreter that can't be run for similar reasons. (Or maybe your
system doesn't support #!
at all.)
Can't exec
%s
(F) Perl was trying to execute the indicated program for you
because that's what the #!
line said to do. If
that's not what you wanted, you may need to mention
perl
on the #!
line
somewhere.
Can't execute
%s
(F) You used the -S
switch, but the
copies of the script to execute found in the
PATH
did not have correct permissions.
Can't find
%s
on PATH, '.' not in PATH
(F) You used the -S
switch, but the
script to execute could not be found in the
PATH
, or at least not with the correct
permissions. The script exists in the current directory, but
PATH
prohibits running it.
Can't find
%s
on PATH
(F) You used the -S
switch, but the
script to execute could not be found in the
PATH
.
Can't find label
%s
(F) You said to goto
a label that isn't
mentioned anywhere that it's possible for us to go to.
Can't find string terminator
%s
anywhere before
EOF
(F) Perl strings can stretch over multiple lines. This message means that the closing delimiter was omitted. Because bracketed quotes count nesting levels, the following is missing its final parenthesis:
print q(The character '(' starts a side comment.);
If you're getting this error from a here document, you may have included unseen whitespace before or after your closing tag. A good programmer's editor will have a way to help you find these characters.
Can't fork
(F) A fatal error occurred trying to
fork
.
Can't get filespec - stale stat
buffer?
(S) This warning is peculiar to VMS. This arises because of
the difference between access checks under VMS and under the Unix
model Perl assumes. Under VMS, access checks are done by filename,
rather than by bits in the stat
buffer, so that
ACLs and other protections can be taken into account.
Unfortunately, Perl assumes that the stat
buffer contains all the necessary information and passes it,
instead of the filespec, to the access-checking routine. It will
try to retrieve the filespec using the device name and FID present
in the stat buffer, but if you have made a subsequent call to the
CRTL stat
routine, this won't work because the
device name is overwritten with each call. If this warning
appears, the name lookup failed and the access-checking routine
gave up and returned false, just to be conservative. (Note: the
access-checking routine knows about the Perl
stat
operator and file tests, so you shouldn't
ever see this warning in response to a Perl command; it arises
only if some internal code takes stat buffers lightly.)
Can't get pipe mailbox device name
(P) This error is peculiar to VMS. After creating a mailbox to act as a pipe, Perl can't retrieve its name for later use.
Can't get SYSGEN parameter value for
MAXBUF
(P) This error is peculiar to VMS. Perl asked
$GETSYI
how big you want your mailbox buffers
to be, and it didn't get an answer.
Can't goto subroutine outside a
subroutine
(F) The deeply magical goto
SUBROUTINE
call can only replace one
subroutine call for another. It can't manufacture one out of whole
cloth. In general, you should be calling it out of only an
AUTOLOAD
routine anyway.
Can't goto subroutine from an
eval-string
(F) The goto
SUBROUTINE
call can't be used to jump
out of an eval
string. (You can use it to jump
out of an eval
BLOCK
, but you probably don't want
to.)
Can't ignore signal CHLD, forcing to
default
(W signal) Perl has detected that it is being run with the
SIGCHLD
signal (sometimes known as
SIGCLD
) disabled. Since disabling this signal
will interfere with proper determination of exit status of child
processes, Perl has reset the signal to its default value. This
situation typically indicates that the parent program under which
Perl may be running (e.g., cron) is being
very careless.
Can't localize through a reference
(F) You said something like local $$ref
,
which Perl can't currently handle because when it goes to restore
the old value of whatever $ref
pointed to after
the scope of the local
is finished, it can't be
sure that $ref
will still be a
reference.
Can't localize lexical variable
%s
(F) You used local
on a variable name
that was previously declared as a lexical variable using
my
. This is not allowed. If you want to
localize a package variable of the same name, qualify it with the
package name.
Can't localize pseudohash element
(F) You said something like local
$ar->{'key'}
, where $ar
is a
reference to a pseudohash. That hasn't been implemented yet, but
you can get a similar effect by localizing the corresponding array
element directly--local
$ar->[$ar->[0]{'key'}]
.
Can't locate
auto/
%s
.al in
@INC
(F) A function (or method) was called in a package that
allows autoloading, but there is no function to autoload. Most
probable causes are a misprint in a function/method name or a
failure to AutoSplit
the file, say, by doing
make install
.
Can't locate
%s
(F) You said to do
(or
require
, or use
) a file that
couldn't be found. Perl looks for the file in all the locations
mentioned in @INC
, unless the filename included
the full path to the file. Perhaps you need to set the
PERL5LIB
or PERL5OPT
environment variable to say where the extra library is, or maybe
the script needs to add the library name to
@INC
. Or maybe you just misspelled the name of
the file.
Can't locate object method
"%s
" via package
"%s
"(F) You called a method correctly, and it correctly indicated a package functioning as a class, but that package doesn't define that particular method, nor does any of its base classes.
Can't locate package
%s
for
@
%s
::ISA
(W syntax) The @ISA
array contained the
name of another package that doesn't seem to exist.
Can't make list assignment to \%ENV on this
system
(F) List assignment to %ENV
is not
supported on some systems, notably VMS.
Can't modify
%s
in
%s
(F) You aren't allowed to assign to the item indicated or otherwise try to change it, such as with an autoincrement.
Can't modify non-lvalue subroutine
call
(F) Subroutines meant to be used in lvalue context should be declared as such.
Can't modify nonexistent substring
(P) The internal routine that does assignment to a
substr
was handed a NULL.
Can't msgrcv to read-only var
(F) The target of a msgrcv
must be
modifiable to be used as a receive buffer.
Can't open
%s
:
%s
(S inplace) The implicit opening of a file through use of
the <>
filehandle, either implicitly
under the -n
or -p
command-line switches or explicitly, failed for the indicated
reason. Usually this is because you don't have read permission for
a file which you named on the command line.
Can't open bidirectional pipe
(W pipe) You tried to say open(CMD,
"|cmd|")
, which is not supported. You can try any of
several modules in the Perl library to do this, such as
IPC::Open2
. Alternatively, direct the pipe's
output to a file using >
, and then read it
in under a different filehandle.
Can't open error file
%s
as stderr
(F) This is an error peculiar to VMS. Perl does its own
command-line redirection, and it couldn't open the file specified
after 2>
or 2>>
on
the command line for writing.
Can't open input file
%s
as stdin
(F) This is an error peculiar to VMS. Perl does its own
command-line redirection, and it couldn't open the file specified
after <
on the command line for
reading.
Can't open output file
%s
as stdout
(F) This is an error peculiar to VMS. Perl does its own
command-line redirection, and it couldn't open the file specified
after >
or >>
on
the command line for writing.
Can't open output pipe (name
:
%s
)
(P) This is an error peculiar to VMS. Perl does its own
command-line redirection, and it couldn't open the pipe into which
to send data destined for STDOUT
.
Can't open perl script
"%s
":
%s
(F) The script you specified can't be opened for the indicated reason.
Can't redefine active sort subroutine
%s
(F) Perl optimizes the internal handling of sort subroutines
and keeps pointers into them. You tried to redefine one such sort
subroutine when it was currently active, which is not allowed. If
you really want to do this, you should write sort {
&func } @x
instead of sort func
@x
.
Can't remove
%s
:
%s
, skipping
file
(S inplace) You requested an inplace edit without creating a backup file. Perl was unable to remove the original file to replace it with the modified file. The file was left unmodified.
Can't rename
%s
to
%s
:
%s
, skipping
file
(S inplace) The rename done by the -i
switch failed for some reason, probably because you don't have
write permission to the directory.
Can't reopen input pipe (name
:
%s
) in binary
mode
(P) An error peculiar to VMS. Perl thought
STDIN
was a pipe, and tried to reopen it to
accept binary data. Alas, it failed.
Can't reswap uid and euid
(P) The setreuid
call failed for some
reason in the setuid emulator of
suidperl.
Can't return outside a subroutine
(F) The return
statement was executed in
mainline code, that is, where there was no subroutine call to
return out of.
Can't return
%s
from lvalue subroutine
(F) Perl detected an attempt to return illegal lvalues (such as temporary or readonly values) from a subroutine used as an lvalue. This is not allowed.
Can't stat script
"%s
"(P) For some reason, you can't fstat
the
script even though you have it open already. Bizarre.
Can't swap uid and euid
(P) The setreuid
call failed for some
reason in the setuid emulator of
suidperl.
Can't take log of
%g
(F) For ordinary real numbers, you can't take the logarithm
of a negative number or zero. There's a
Math::Complex
package that comes standard with
Perl, though, if you really want to do that for the negative
numbers.
Can't take sqrt of
%g
(F) For ordinary real numbers, you can't take the square
root of a negative number. There's a
Math::Complex
package that comes standard with
Perl, though, if you really want to do that.
Can't undef active subroutine
(F) You can't undefine a routine that's currently running.
You can, however, redefine it while it's running, and you can even
undef
the redefined subroutine while the old
routine is running. Go figure.
Can't unshift
(F) You tried to unshift an "unreal" array that can't be
unshift
ed, such as the main Perl stack.
Can't upgrade that kind of scalar
(P) The internal sv_upgrade
routine adds
"members" to an SV, making it into a more specialized kind of SV.
The top several SV types are so specialized, however, that they
cannot be interconverted. This message indicates that such a
conversion was attempted.
Can't upgrade to undef
(P) The undefined SV is the bottom of the totem pole, in the
scheme of upgradability. Upgrading to undef
indicates an error in the code calling
sv_upgrade
.
Can't use %%! because Errno.pm is not
available
(F) The first time the %!
hash is used,
Perl automatically loads the Errno
module. The
Errno
module is expected to tie the
%!
hash to provide symbolic names for
$!
errno values.
Can't use "my
%s
" in sort
comparison
(F) The global variables $a
and
$b
are reserved for sort comparisons. You
mentioned $a
or $b
in the
same line as the <=>
or
cmp
operator, and the variable had earlier been
declared as a lexical variable. Either qualify the sort variable
with the package name, or rename the lexical variable.
Bad evalled substitution pattern
(F) You've used the /e
switch to evaluate
the replacement for a substitution, but Perl found a syntax error
in the code to evaluate, most likely an unexpected right brace
}
.
Can't use
%s
for loop variable
(F) Only a simple scalar variable may
be used as a loop variable on a foreach
.
Can't use
%s
ref as
%s
ref
(F) You've mixed up your reference types. You have to
dereference a reference of the type needed. You can use the
ref
function to test the type of the reference,
if need be.
Can't use
%c
to mean $
%c
in expression
(W syntax) In an ordinary expression, backslash is a unary
operator that creates a reference to its argument. The use of
backslash to indicate a backreference to a matched substring is
valid only as part of a regular expression pattern. Trying to do
this in ordinary Perl code produces a value that prints out
looking like SCALAR(0xdecaf)
. Use the
$1
form instead.
Can't use bareword
(
"%s
") as
%s
ref while "strict refs" in
use
(F) Only hard references are allowed by strict
refs
. Symbolic references are disallowed.
Can't use string
(
"%s
") as
%s
ref while "strict refs" in
use
(F) Only hard references are allowed by strict
refs
. Symbolic references are disallowed.
Can't use an undefined value as
%s
reference
(F) A value used as either a hard reference or a symbolic reference must be a defined value. This helps to delurk some insidious errors.
Can't use global
%s
in "my
"(F) You tried to declare a magical variable as a lexical variable. This is not allowed because the magic can be tied to only one location (namely the global variable) and it would be incredibly confusing to have variables in your program that looked like magical variables but weren't.
Can't use subscript on
%s
(F) The compiler tried to interpret a bracketed expression as a subscript. But to the left of the brackets was an expression that didn't look like an array reference, or anything else subscriptable.
Can't weaken a nonreference
(F) You attempted to weaken something that was not a reference. Only references can be weakened.
Can't x= to read-only value
(F) You tried to repeat a constant value (often the undefined value) with an assignment operator, which implies modifying the value itself. Perhaps you need to copy the value to a temporary variable, and repeat that.
Can't find an opnumber for
"%s
"(F) A string of a form
CORE:
:word
was given
to prototype
, but there is no built-in with the
name word
.
Can't resolve method
`
%s
' overloading
`
%s
' in package
`
%s
'(F|P) An error occurred when resolving overloading specified
by a method name (as opposed to a subroutine reference): no such
method callable via the package. If the method name is
???
, this is an internal error.
Character class
[
:%s
:]
unknown
(F) The class in the character class [:
:]
syntax is unknown.
Character class syntax
[
%s
] belongs inside
character classes
(W unsafe) The character class constructs [:
:]
, [= =]
, and [.
.]
go inside character classes, for
example: /[012[:alpha:]345]/
. Note that the
[= =]
and [. .]
constructs
are not currently implemented; they are simply placeholders for
future extensions.
Character class syntax [. .] is reserved for future
extensions
(W regexp) Within regular expression character classes
([]
), the syntax beginning with
[
. and ending with .]
is
reserved for future extensions. If you need to represent those
character sequences inside a regular expression character class,
just quote the square brackets with the backslash:
[
. and .]
.
Character class syntax [= =] is reserved for future
extensions
(W regexp) Within regular expression character classes
([]
), the syntax beginning with
[=
and ending with =]
is
reserved for future extensions. If you need to represent those
character sequences inside a regular expression character class,
just quote the square brackets with the backslash:
[=
and =]
.
chmod() mode argument is missing initial
0
(W chmod) A novice will sometimes say:
chmod 777, $filename
not realizing that 777 will be interpreted as a decimal number, equivalent to 01411. Octal constants are introduced with a leading 0 in Perl, as in C.
Close on unopened file
<
%s
>
(W unopened) You tried to close a filehandle that was never opened.
Compilation failed in require
(F) Perl could not compile a file specified in a
require
statement. Perl uses this generic
message when none of the errors that it encountered were severe
enough to halt compilation immediately.
Complex regular subexpression recursion limit
(
%d
)
exceeded
(W regexp) The regular expression engine uses recursion in
complex situations where backtracking is required. Recursion depth
is limited to 32,766, or perhaps less in architectures where the
stack cannot grow arbitrarily. ("Simple" and "medium" situations
are handled without recursion and are not subject to a limit.) Try
shortening the string under examination; looping in Perl code
(e.g., with while
) rather than in the regular
expression engine; or rewriting the regular expression so that it
is simpler or backtracks less.
connect() on closed socket
%s
(W closed) You tried to do a connect on a closed socket. Did
you forget to check the return value of your
socket
call?
Constant is not
%s
reference
(F) A constant value (perhaps declared using the
use constant
pragma) is being dereferenced, but
it amounts to the wrong type of reference. The message indicates
the type of reference that was expected. This usually indicates a
syntax error in dereferencing the constant value.
Constant subroutine
%s
redefined
(S|W redefine) You redefined a subroutine that had previously been eligible for inlining.
Constant subroutine
%s
undefined
(W misc) You undefined a subroutine that had previously been eligible for inlining.
constant(
%s
)
:
%s
(F) The parser found inconsistencies either while attempting
to define an overloaded constant or when trying to find the
character name specified in the N{…}
escape.
Perhaps you forgot to load the corresponding
overload
or charnames
pragma?
Copy method did not return a
reference
(F) The method that overloads =
is
buggy.
CORE:
:%s
is not a keyword
(F) The CORE:
: namespace is reserved for
Perl keywords.
Corrupt malloc ptr
0x
%lx
at
0x
%lx
(P) The malloc
package that comes with
Perl had an internal failure.
corrupted regexp pointers
(P) The regular expression engine got confused by what the regular expression compiler gave it.
corrupted regexp program
(P) The regular expression engine got passed a regexp program without a valid magic number.
Deep recursion on subroutine
"%s
"(W recursion) This subroutine has called itself (directly or indirectly) 100 times more than it has returned. This probably indicates an infinite recursion, unless you're writing strange benchmark programs, in which case it indicates something else.
defined(@array) is deprecated
(D deprecated) defined
is not usually
useful on arrays because it checks for an undefined
scalar value. If you want to see if the array
is empty, just use if (@array) { # not empty
}
.
defined(%hash) is deprecated
(D deprecated) defined
is not usually
useful on hashes because it checks for an undefined
scalar value. If you want to see if the hash
is empty, just use if (%hash) { # not empty
}
.
Delimiter for here document is too
long
(F) In a here document construct like
<<FOO
, the label FOO
is too long for Perl to handle. You have to be seriously twisted
to write code that triggers this error.
Did not produce a valid header
See Server error
.
(Did you mean
&
%s
instead?)
(W) You probably referred to an imported subroutine
&FOO
as $FOO
or some
such.
(Did you mean "local" instead of
"our"?)
(W misc) Remember that our
does not
localize the declared global variable. You have declared it again
in the same lexical scope, which seems superfluous.
(Did you mean $ or @ instead of %?)
(W) You probably said %hash{$key}
when
you meant $hash{$key}
or
@hash{@keys}
. On the other hand, maybe you just
meant %hash
and got carried away.
Died
(F) You passed die
an empty string (the
equivalent of die "
") or you called it with no
args and both $@
and $_
were
empty.
(Do you need to predeclare
%s
?)
(S) This is an educated guess made in conjunction with the
message "%s
found where operator
expected". It often means a subroutine or module name is being
referenced that hasn't been declared yet. This may be because of
ordering problems in your file or because of a missing
sub
, package
,
require
, or use
statement.
If you're referencing something that isn't defined yet, you don't
actually have to define the subroutine or package before the
current location. You can use an empty sub foo;
or package FOO;
to enter a "forward"
declaration.
Document contains no data
See Server error
.
Don't know how to handle magic of type
'%s
'(P) The internal handling of magical variables has been cursed.
do_study: out of memory
(P) This should have been caught by
safemalloc
instead.
Duplicate free() ignored
(S malloc) An internal routine called
free
on something that had already been
freed.
elseif should be elsif
(S) There is no keyword "elseif
" in Perl
because Larry thinks it's ugly. Your code will be interpreted as
an attempt to call a method named elseif
for
the class returned by the following block. This is unlikely to be
what you want.
%s
failed--call queue
aborted
(F) An untrapped exception was raised while executing a
CHECK
, INIT
, or
END
subroutine. Processing of the remainder of
the queue of such routines has been prematurely ended.
entering effective
%s
failed
(F) While under the use filetest
pragma,
switching the real and effective UIDs or GIDs failed.
Error converting file specification
%s
(F) This is an error peculiar to VMS. Because Perl may have to deal with file specifications in either VMS or Unix syntax, it converts them to a single form when it must operate on them directly. Either you've passed an invalid file specification to Perl, or you've found a case the conversion routines don't handle. Drat.
%s
: Eval-group in insecure
regular expression
(F) Perl detected tainted data when trying to compile a
regular expression that contains the (?{ … })
zero-width assertion, which is unsafe.
%s
: Eval-group not
allowed, use re 'eval
'(F) A regular expression contained the (?{ …
})
zero-width assertion, but that construct is only
allowed when the use re 'eval
' pragma is in
effect.
%s
: Eval-group not allowed
at run time
(F) Perl tried to compile a regular expression containing
the (?{ … })
zero-width assertion at run time,
as it would when the pattern contains interpolated values. Since
that is a security risk, it is not allowed. If you insist, you may
still do this by explicitly building the pattern from an
interpolated string at run time and using that in an
eval
.
Excessively long <> operator
(F) The contents of a <>
operator
may not exceed the maximum size of a Perl identifier. If you're
just trying to glob a long list of filenames, try using the
glob
operator or putting the filenames into a
variable and globbing that.
Execution of
%s
aborted due to compilation errors
(F) The final summary message when a Perl compilation fails.
Exiting eval via
%s
(W exiting) You are exiting an eval
by
unconventional means, such as a goto
or a loop
control statement.
Exiting format via
%s
(W exiting) You are exiting a format
by
unconventional means, such as a goto
or a loop
control statement.
Exiting pseudoblock via
%s
(W exiting) You are exiting a rather special block construct
(like a sort block or subroutine) by unconventional means, such as
a goto
or a loop control statement.
Exiting subroutine via
%s
(W exiting) You are exiting a subroutine by unconventional
means, such as a goto
or a loop control
statement.
Exiting substitution via
%s
(W exiting) You are exiting a substitution by unconventional
means, such as a return
, a
goto
, or a loop control statement.
Explicit blessing to '' (assuming package
main)
(W misc) You are blessing a reference to a zero-length
string. This has the effect of blessing the reference into the
package main
. This is usually not what you
want. Consider providing a default target package, such as
bless($ref, $p || 'MyPackage')
;
false [] range
"%s
" in
regexp
(W regexp) A character class range must start and end at a
literal character, not another character class like
d
or [:alpha:]
. The
-
in your false range is interpreted as a
literal -
. Consider quoting the
-
like this: -
.
Fatal VMS error at
%s
, line
%d
(P) This is an error peculiar to VMS. Something untoward
happened in a VMS system service or RTL routine; Perl's exit
status should provide more details. The filename in
at
%s
and the line
number in line
%d
tell you which section of the Perl source code is
distressed.
fcntl is not implemented
(F) Your machine apparently doesn't implement
fcntl
. What is this, a PDP-11 or
something?
Filehandle
%s
never opened
(W unopened) An I/O operation was attempted on a filehandle
that was never initialized. You need to do an
open
or a socket
call, or
call a constructor from the FileHandle
module.
Filehandle
%s
opened only for input
(W io) You tried to write on a read-only filehandle. If you
intended it to be a read-write filehandle, you needed to open it
with +<
or +>
or
+>>
instead of with
<
or nothing. If you intended only to write
the file, use >
or
>>
.
Filehandle
%s
opened only for output
(W io) You tried to read from a filehandle opened only for
writing. If you intended it to be a read/write filehandle, you
needed to open it with +<
or
+>
or +>>
instead
of with <
or nothing. If you intended only
to read from the file, use <
.
Final $ should be $ or $name
(F) You must now decide whether the final
$
in a string was meant to be a literal dollar
sign or was meant to introduce a variable name that happens to be
missing. So you have to add either the backslash or the
name.
Final @ should be @ or @name
(F) You must now decide whether the final
@
in a string was meant to be a literal "at"
sign or was meant to introduce a variable name that happens to be
missing. So you have to add either the backslash or the
name.
flock() on closed filehandle
%s
(W closed) The filehandle you're attempting to
flock
got itself closed some time before now.
Check your logic flow. flock
operates on
filehandles. Are you attempting to call flock
on a dirhandle by the same name?
Format
%s
redefined
(W redefine) You redefined a format. To suppress this warning, say:
{ no warnings; eval "format NAME =…"; }
Format not terminated
(F) A format must be terminated by a line with a solitary dot. Perl got to the end of your file without finding such a line.
Found = in conditional, should be ==
(W syntax) You said:
if ($foo = 123)
when you meant:
if ($foo == 123)
(or something like that).
gdbm store returned
%d
, errno
%d
, key
"%s
"(S) A warning from the GDBM_File
extension that a store failed.
gethostent not implemented
(F) Your C library apparently doesn't implement
gethostent
, probably because if it did, it'd
feel morally obligated to return every hostname on the
Internet.
get
%s
name()
on closed socket
%s
(W closed) You tried to get a socket or peer socket name on
a closed socket. Did you forget to check the return value of your
socket
call?
getpwnam returned invalid UIC %#o for user
"%s
"(S) A warning peculiar to VMS. The call to
sys$getuai
underlying the
getpwnam
operator returned an invalid
UIC.
getsockopt() on closed socket
%s
(W closed) You tried to get a socket option on a closed
socket. Did you forget to check the return value of your
socket
call?
glob failed
(
%s
)
(W glob) Something went wrong with the external program(s)
used for glob
and
<*.c>
. Usually, this means that you
supplied a glob
pattern that caused the
external program to fail and exit with a nonzero status. If the
message indicates that the abnormal exit resulted in a core dump,
this may also mean that your csh (C shell) is
broken. If so, you should change all of the
csh-related variables in
config.sh: If you have
tcsh, make the variables refer to it as if it
were csh (e.g., full_csh='/usr/bin/tcsh
'),
otherwise, make them all empty (except that
d_csh
should be 'undef
') so
that Perl will think csh is missing. In
either case, after editing config.sh, run
./Configure -S and rebuild Perl.
Glob not terminated
(F) The lexer saw a left angle bracket in a place where it
was expecting a term, so it's looking for the corresponding right
angle bracket and not finding it. Chances are you left some needed
parentheses out earlier in the line, and you really meant a
<
symbol.
Global symbol
"%s
" requires explicit
package name
(F) You've said use strict vars
, which
indicates that all variables must either be lexically scoped
(using my
), declared beforehand using
our
, or explicitly qualified to say which
package the global variable is in (using
:
:).
Got an error from DosAllocMem
(P) This is an error peculiar to OS/2. Most probably you're using an obsolete version of Perl, so this error should not happen anyway.
goto must have label
(F) Unlike with next
or
last
, you're not allowed to
goto
an unspecified destination.
Had to create
%s
unexpectedly
(S internal) A routine asked for a symbol from a symbol table that ought to have existed already, but for some reason it didn't and had to be created on an emergency basis to prevent a core dump.
Hash %
%s
missing the % in argument
%d
of
%s
()
(D deprecated) Really old Perl let you omit the
%
on hash names in some spots. This is now
heavily deprecated.
Hexadecimal number > 0xffffffff
non-portable
(W portable) The hexadecimal number you specified is larger
than 2**32-1
(4,294,967,295) and therefore
nonportable between systems.
Identifier too long
(F) Perl limits identifiers (names for variables, functions,
etc.) to about 250 characters for simple names, and somewhat more
for compound names (like $A::B
). You've
exceeded Perl's limits. Future versions of Perl are likely to
eliminate these arbitrary limitations.
Ill-formed CRTL environ value
"%s
"(W internal) This is a warning peculiar to VMS. Perl tried
to read the CRTL's internal environ array and encountered an
element without the =
delimiter used to
separate keys from values. The element is ignored.
Ill-formed message in prime_env_iter:
|
%s
|
(W internal) This is a warning peculiar to VMS. Perl tried
to read a logical name or CLI symbol definition when preparing to
iterate over %ENV
and didn't see the expected
delimiter between key and value, so the line was ignored.
Illegal character
%s
(carriage
return)
(F) Perl normally treats carriage returns in the program text as it would any other whitespace, which means you should never see this error when Perl was built using standard options. For some reason, your version of Perl appears to have been built without this support. Talk to your Perl administrator.
Illegal division by zero
(F) You tried to divide a number by 0. Either something was wrong in your logic, or you need to put a conditional in to guard against meaningless input.
Illegal modulus zero
(F) You tried to divide a number by 0 to get the remainder. Most numbers don't take to this kindly.
Illegal binary digit
%s
(F) You used a digit other than 0 or 1 in a binary number.
Illegal octal digit
%s
(F) You used an 8 or 9 in a octal number.
Illegal binary digit
%s
ignored
(W digit) You may have tried to use a digit other than 0 or 1 in a binary number. Interpretation of the binary number stopped before the offending digit.
Illegal octal digit
%s
ignored
(W digit) You may have tried to use an 8 or 9 in a octal number. Interpretation of the octal number stopped before the 8 or 9.
Illegal hexadecimal digit
%s
ignored
(W digit) You may have tried to use a character other than
0
through 9
,
A
through F
, or
a
through f in a hexadecimal number.
Interpretation of the hexadecimal number stopped before the
illegal character.
Illegal number of bits in vec
(F) The number of bits in vec
(the third
argument) must be a power of two from 1 to 32 (or 64, if your
platform supports that).
Illegal switch in PERL5OPT
:
%s
(X) The PERL5OPT
environment variable may
only be used to set the following switches:
-[DIMUdmw]
.
In string, @
%s
now must be written as
@
%s
(F) It used to be that Perl would try to guess whether you
wanted an array interpolated or a literal @
. It
did this when the string was first used at run time. Now strings
are parsed at compile time, and ambiguous instances of
@
must be disambiguated, either by prepending a
backslash to indicate a literal, or by declaring (or using) the
array within the program before the string (lexically). (Someday
it will simply assume that an unbackslashed @
interpolates an array.)
Insecure dependency in
%s
(F) You tried to do something that the tainting mechanism
didn't like. The tainting mechanism is turned on when you're
running setuid or setgid, or when you specify
-T
to turn it on explicitly. The tainting
mechanism labels all data that's derived directly or indirectly
from the user, who is considered to be unworthy of your trust. If
any such data is used in a "dangerous" operation, you get this
error.
Insecure directory in
%s
(F) You can't use system
,
exec
, or a piped open in a setuid or setgid
script if $ENV{PATH}
contains a directory that
is writable by the world.
Insecure
$ENV{
%s
} while
running
%s
(F) You can't use system
,
exec
, or a piped open in a setuid or setgid
script if any of $ENV{PATH}
,
$ENV{IFS}
, $ENV{CDPATH}
,
$ENV{ENV}
, or $ENV{BASH_ENV}
are derived from data supplied (or potentially supplied) by the
user. The script must set the path to a known value, using
trustworthy data.
Integer overflow in
%s
number
(W overflow) The hexadecimal, octal, or binary number you
have specified either as a literal or as an argument to
hex
or oct
is too big for
your architecture and has been converted to a floating-point
number. On 32-bit machines, the largest hex, octal, or binary
number representable without overflow is 0xFFFFFFFF, 037777777777,
or 0b11111111111111111111111111111111 respectively. Note that Perl
transparently promotes all numbers to a floating-point
representation internally--subject to loss of precision errors in
subsequent operations.
Internal inconsistency in tracking
vforks
(S) This is a warning peculiar to VMS. Perl keeps track of
the number of times you've called fork
and
exec
, to determine whether the current call to
exec
should affect the current script or a
subprocess (see "exec LIST" in perlvms
(1)). Somehow, this count has become scrambled, so Perl
is making a guess and treating this exec
as a
request to terminate the Perl script and execute the specified
command.
internal disaster in regexp
(P) Something went badly wrong in the regular expression parser.
internal urp in regexp at
/
%s
/
(P) Something went badly awry in the regular expression parser.
Invalid
%s
attribute
: %s
(F) The indicated attribute for a subroutine or variable was not recognized by Perl or by a user-supplied handler.
Invalid
%s
attributes
: %s
(F) The indicated attributes for a subroutine or variable were not recognized by Perl or by a user-supplied handler.
invalid [] range
"%s
" in
regexp
(F) The range specified in a character class had a minimum character greater than the maximum character.
Invalid conversion in
%s
:
"%s
"(W printf) Perl does not understand the given format conversion.
Invalid separator character
%s
in attribute
list
(F) Something other than a colon or whitespace was seen between the elements of an attribute list. If the previous attribute had a parenthesized parameter list, perhaps that list was terminated too soon.
Invalid type in pack:
'%s
'(F) The given character is not a valid pack type.
(W pack) The given character is not a valid pack type, but it used to be silently ignored.
Invalid type in unpack:
'%s
'(F) The given character is not a valid unpack type.
(W unpack) The given character is not a valid unpack type, but it used to be silently ignored.
ioctl is not implemented
(F) Your machine apparently doesn't implement
ioctl
, which is pretty strange for a machine
that supports C.
junk on end of regexp
(P) The regular expression parser is confused.
Label not found for "last
%s
"(F) You named a loop to break out of, but you're not currently in a loop of that name, not even if you count where you were called from.
Label not found for "next
%s
"(F) You named a loop to continue, but you're not currently in a loop of that name, not even if you count where you were called from.
Label not found for "redo
%s
"(F) You named a loop to restart, but you're not currently in a loop of that name, not even if you count where you were called from.
leaving effective
%s
failed
(F) While under the use filetest
pragma,
switching the real and effective UIDs or GIDs failed.
listen() on closed socket
%s
(W closed) You tried to do a listen on a closed socket. Did
you forget to check the return value of your
socket
call?
Lvalue subs returning
%s
not implemented
yet
(F) Due to limitations in the current implementation, array and hash values cannot be returned in subroutines used in lvalue context.
Malformed PERLLIB_PREFIX
(F) This is an error peculiar to OS/2.
PERLLIB_PREFIX
should be of the form:
prefix1
;prefix2
or:
prefix1 prefix2
with nonempty prefix1
and
prefix2
. If
prefix1
is indeed a prefix of a
built-in library search path, prefix2
is substituted. The error may appear if components are not found,
or are too long. See PERLLIB_PREFIX
in the
README.os2 file bundled with the Perl
distribution.
Method for operation
%s
not found in
package
%s
during
blessing
(F) An attempt was made to specify an entry in an overloading table that doesn't resolve to a valid subroutine.
Method
%s
not permitted
See Server error
.
Might be a runaway multi-line
%s
string starting on
line
%d
(S) An advisory indicating that the previous error may have been caused by a missing delimiter on a string or pattern, because the string eventually ended earlier on the current line.
Misplaced _ in number
(W syntax) An underline in a decimal constant wasn't at a 3-digit boundary.
Missing $ on loop variable
(F) Apparently, you've been programming in
csh too much. Variables are always mentioned
with the $
in Perl, unlike in the shells, where
it can vary from one line to the next.
Missing
%s
brace
%s
on N{}
(F) You used the wrong syntax of character name literal
N{charname}
within double-quotish
context.
Missing comma after first argument to
%s
function
(F) While certain functions allow you to specify a filehandle or an "indirect object" before the argument list, this ain't one of them.
Missing command in piped open
(W pipe) You used the open(FH, "|
command")
or open(FH, "command |")
construction, but the command was missing or blank.
(Missing operator before
%s
?)
(S) This is an educated guess made in conjunction with the
message "%s
found where operator
expected". Often the missing operator is a comma.
Missing right curly or square
bracket
(F) The lexer counted more opening curly or square brackets than closing ones. As a general rule, you'll find it's missing near the place you were last editing.
Modification of a read-only value
attempted
(F) You tried, directly or indirectly, to change the value
of a constant. You didn't, of course, try 2 =
1
, because the compiler catches that. But an easy way to
do the same thing is:
sub mod { $_[0] = 1 } mod(2);
Another way is to assign to a substr
that's off the end of the string.
Modification of non-creatable array value attempted,
subscript %d
(F) You tried to make an array value spring into existence, and the subscript was probably negative, even counting from end of the array backward.
Modification of non-creatable hash value attempted,
subscript
"%s
"(P) You tried to make a hash value spring into existence, and it couldn't be created for some peculiar reason.
Module name must be constant
(F) Only a bare module name is allowed as the first argument
to a use
.
msg
%s
not implemented
(F) You don't have System V message IPC on your system.
Multidimensional syntax
%s
not
supported
(W syntax) Multidimensional arrays aren't written like
$foo[1,2,3]
. They're written like
$foo[1][2][3]
, as in C.
Missing name in "my sub
"(F) The reserved syntax for lexically scoped subroutines requires that they have a name with which they can be found.
Name
"%s
:
:%s
"
used only once: possible typo
(W once) Typographical errors often show up as unique
variable names. If you had a good reason for having a unique name,
then just mention it again somehow to suppress the message. The
our
declaration is provided for this
purpose.
Negative length
(F) You tried to do a
read
/write
/send
/recv
operation with a buffer length that is less than 0. This is
difficult to imagine.
nested *?+ in regexp
(F) You can't quantify a quantifier without intervening
parentheses. So things like **
or
+*
or ?*
are illegal.
Note, however, that the minimal matching quantifiers,
*?
, +?
, and
??
appear to be nested quantifiers, but
aren't.
No #! line
(F) The setuid emulator requires that scripts have a
well-formed #!
line even on machines that don't
support the #!
construct.
No
%s
allowed while running setuid
(F) Certain operations are deemed to be too insecure for a setuid or setgid script to even attempt. Generally speaking, there will be another way to do what you want that is, if not secure, at least securable.
No -e allowed in setuid scripts
(F) A setuid script can't be specified by the user.
No
%s
specified for
-
%c
(F) The indicated command-line switch needs a mandatory argument, but you haven't specified one.
No comma allowed after
%s
(F) A list operator that has a filehandle or "indirect object" is not allowed to have a comma between that and the following arguments. Otherwise, it would be interpreted as just another argument.
One obscure situation where this message occurs is when you
expect a constant to be imported into your namespace with
use
or import
, but no such
importing took place (say, because your operating system doesn't
support that particular constant). You should have used an
explicit import list for the constants you expect to see. An
explicit import list would probably have caught this error
earlier. Or maybe there's just a typo in the name of the
constant.
No command into which to pipe on command
line
(F) This is an error peculiar to VMS. Perl handles its own
command-line redirection and found a |
at the
end of the command line, so it doesn't know where you want to pipe
the output from this command.
No DB::DB routine defined
(F) The currently executing code was compiled with the
-d
switch, but for some reason the
perl5db.pl file (or some facsimile thereof)
didn't define a routine to be called at the beginning of each
statement. Which is odd, because the file should have been
required automatically and should have blown up the require if it
didn't parse right.
No dbm on this machine
(P) This is counted as an internal error; every machine should supply a DBM nowadays because Perl comes with SDBM.
No DBsub routine
(F) The currently executing code was compiled with the
-d
switch, but for some reason the
perl5db.pl file (or some facsimile thereof)
didn't define a DB::sub
routine to be called at
the beginning of each ordinary subroutine call.
No error file after 2> or 2>> on command
line
(F) This is an error peculiar to VMS. Perl handles its own
command-line redirection, and found a 2>
or
a 2>>
on the command line, but it can't
find the name of the file to which to write data destined for
STDERR
.
No input file after < on command
line
(F) This is an error peculiar to VMS. Perl handles its own
command-line redirection and found a <
on
the command line, but it can't find the name of the file from
which to read data for STDIN
.
No output file after > on command
line
(F) This is an error peculiar to VMS. Perl handles its own
command-line redirection and found a lone >
at the end of the command line, but it doesn't know where you
wanted to redirect STDOUT
.
No output file after > or >> on command
line
(F) This is an error peculiar to VMS. Perl handles its own
command-line redirection and found a >
or a
>>
on the command line, but it can't find
the name of the file to which to write data destined for
STDOUT
.
No package name allowed for variable
%s
in "our
"(F) Fully qualified variable names are not allowed in
our
declarations, because they don't make much
sense under existing semantics. Such syntax is reserved for future
extensions.
No Perl script found in input
(F) You called perl -x, but no line was
found in the file beginning with #!
and
containing the word "perl
".
No setregid available
(F) Configure didn't find anything
resembling the setregid
call for your
system.
No setreuid available
(F) Configure didn't find anything
resembling the setreuid
call for your
system.
No space allowed after
-
%c
(F) The argument to the indicated command-line switch must follow immediately after the switch, without intervening spaces.
No such pseudohash field
"%s
"(F) You tried to access an array as a hash, but the field name used is not defined. The hash at index 0 should map all valid field names to array indices for that to work.
No such pseudohash field
"%s
" in
variable
%s
of
type
%s
(F) You tried to access a field of a typed variable, but the
type does not know about the field name. The field names are
looked up in the %FIELDS
hash in the type
package at compile time. The %FIELDS
hash is
usually set up with the fields
pragma.
No such pipe open
(P) This is an error peculiar to VMS. The internal routine
my_pclose
tried to close a pipe that hadn't
been opened. This should have been caught earlier as an attempt to
close an unopened filehandle.
No such signal:
SIG
%s
(W signal) The signal name you specified as a subscript to
%SIG
was not recognized. Say kill
-l in your shell to see the valid signal names on your
system.
no UTC offset information; assuming local time is
UTC
(S) This is a warning peculiar to VMS. Perl was unable to
find the local time zone offset, so it assumes that the local
system time and the UTC are equivalent. If they're not, define the
logical name SYS$TIMEZONE_DIFFERENTIAL
to
translate to the number of seconds that need to be added to UTC to
get local time.
Not a CODE reference
(F) Perl was trying to evaluate a reference to a code value
(that is, a subroutine) but found a reference to something else
instead. You can use the ref
function to find
out what kind of ref it really was.
Not a format reference
(F) We're not sure how you managed to generate a reference to an anonymous format, but this message indicates that you did and that it didn't exist.
Not a GLOB reference
(F) Perl was trying to evaluate a reference to a "typeglob"
(that is, a symbol table entry that looks like
*foo
) but found a reference to something else
instead. You can use the ref
function to find
out what kind of ref it really was.
Not a HASH reference
(F) Perl was trying to evaluate a reference to a hash value
but found a reference to something else instead. You can use the
ref
function to find out what kind of ref it
really was.
Not a perl script
(F) The setuid emulator requires that scripts have a
well-formed #!
line even on machines that don't
support the #!
construct. The line must mention
"perl
".
Not a SCALAR reference
(F) Perl was trying to evaluate a reference to a scalar
value but found a reference to something else instead. You can use
the ref
function to find out what kind of ref
it really was.
Not a subroutine reference
(F) Perl was trying to evaluate a reference to a code value
(that is, a subroutine) but found a reference to something else
instead. You can use the ref
function to find
out what kind of ref it really was.
Not a subroutine reference in overload
table
(F) An attempt was made to specify an entry in an overloading table that doesn't somehow point to a valid subroutine.
Not an ARRAY reference
(F) Perl was trying to evaluate a reference to an array
value but found a reference to something else instead. You can use
the ref
function to find out what kind of ref
it really was.
Not enough arguments for
%s
(F) The function requires more arguments than you specified.
Not enough format arguments
(W syntax) A format specified more picture fields than the next line supplied.
Null filename used
(F) You can't require the null filename, especially because on many machines that means the current directory!
Null picture in formline
(F) The first argument to formline
must
be a valid format picture specification. The argument was found to
be empty, which probably means you supplied it an uninitialized
value.
NULL OP IN RUN
(P debugging) Some internal routine called
run
with a null opcode pointer.
Null realloc
(P) An attempt was made to realloc NULL.
NULL regexp argument
(P) The internal pattern-matching routines blew it big time.
NULL regexp parameter
(P) The internal pattern-matching routines are out of their gourd.
Number too long
(F) Perl limits the representation of decimal numbers in
programs to about about 250 characters. You've exceeded that
length. Future versions of Perl are likely to eliminate this
arbitrary limitation. In the meantime, try using scientific
notation (e.g., 1e6
instead of
1_000_000
).
Octal number > 037777777777
non-portable
(W portable) The octal number you specified is larger than
2**32-1
(4,294,967,295) and therefore
nonportable between systems.
Octal number in vector unsupported
(F) Numbers with a leading 0
are not
currently allowed in vectors. The octal number interpretation of
such numbers may be supported in a future version.
Odd number of elements in hash
assignment
(W misc) You specified an odd number of elements to initialize a hash, which is odd because hashes come in key/value pairs.
Offset outside string
(F) You tried to do a
read
/write
/send
/recv
operation with an offset pointing outside the buffer. This is
difficult to imagine. The sole exception to this rule is that
sysread
ing past the buffer will extend the
buffer and zero-pad the new area.
oops: oopsAV
(S internal) An internal warning indicating that the grammar is screwed up.
oops: oopsHV
(S internal) An internal warning indicating that the grammar is screwed up.
Operation
`
%s
': no method
found
, %s
(F) An attempt was made to perform an overloaded operation
for which no handler was defined. While some handlers can be
autogenerated in terms of other handlers, there is no default
handler for any operation, unless the fallback
overloading key is specified to be true.
Operator or semicolon missing before
%s
(S ambiguous) You used a variable or subroutine call when
the parser was expecting an operator. The parser has assumed you
really meant to use an operator, but this is highly likely to be
incorrect. For example, if you accidentally say
*foo
*foo
, it will be
interpreted as if you'd said *foo *
'foo
'.
Out of memory!
(X) Perl's internal malloc
function
returned 0, indicating that the remaining memory (or virtual
memory) was insufficient to satisfy the request. Perl has no
option but to exit immediately.
Out of memory for yacc stack
(F) The yacc parser wanted to grow its
stack so it could continue parsing, but realloc
wouldn't give it more memory, virtual or otherwise.
Out of memory during request for
%s
(X|F) The malloc
function returned 0,
indicating that the remaining memory (or virtual memory) was
insufficient to satisfy the request.
The request was judged to be small, so the possibility to
trap it depends on the way Perl was compiled. By default, it is
not trappable. However, if compiled for this purpose, Perl may use
the contents of $^M
as an emergency pool after
die
ing with this message. In this case, the
error is trappable once.
Out of memory during "large" request for
%s
(F) Perl's internal malloc
function
returned 0, indicating that the remaining memory (or virtual
memory) was insufficient to satisfy the request. However, the
request was judged large enough (compile-time default is 64K), so
a possibility to shut down by trapping this error is
granted.
Out of memory during ridiculously large
request
(F) You can't allocate more than
2**31+
"small amount" bytes. This error is most
likely to be caused by a typo in the Perl program (e.g.,
$arr[time]
instead of
$arr[$time]
).
page overflow
(W io) A single call to write
produced
more lines than can fit on a page.
panic: ck_grep
(P) The program failed an internal consistency check while
trying to compile a grep
.
panic: ck_split
(P) The program failed an internal consistency check while
trying to compile a split
.
panic: corrupt saved stack index
(P) The savestack was requested to restore more localized values than there are in the savestack.
panic: del_backref
(P) The program failed an internal consistency check while trying to reset a weak reference.
panic: die
%s
(P) We popped the context stack to an
eval
context and then discovered it wasn't an
eval
context.
panic: do_match
(P) The internal pp_match
routine was
called with invalid operational data.
panic: do_split
(P) Something terrible went wrong in setting up for the
split
.
panic: do_subst
(P) The internal pp_subst
routine was
called with invalid operational data.
panic: do_trans
(P) The internal do_trans
routine was
called with invalid operational data.
panic: frexp
(P) The library function frexp
failed,
making printf("%f")
impossible.
panic: goto
(P) We popped the context stack to a context with the
specified label and then discovered it wasn't a context in which
we know how to do a goto
.
panic: INTERPCASEMOD
(P) The lexer got into a bad state at a case modifier.
panic: INTERPCONCAT
(P) The lexer got into a bad state parsing a string with brackets.
panic: kid popen errno read
(F) The forked child returned an incomprehensible message about its errno.
panic: last
(P) We popped the context stack to a block context and then discovered it wasn't a block context.
panic: leave_scope clearsv
(P) A writable lexical variable became read-only somehow within the scope.
panic: leave_scope inconsistency
(P) The savestack probably got out of sync. At least, there
was an invalid enum
on the top of it.
panic: malloc
(P) Something requested a negative number of bytes of
malloc
.
panic: magic_killbackrefs
(P) The program failed an internal consistency check while trying to reset all weak references to an object.
panic: mapstart
(P) The compiler is screwed up with respect to the
map
function.
panic: null array
(P) One of the internal array routines was passed a null AV pointer.
panic: pad_alloc
(P) The compiler got confused about which scratchpad it was allocating and freeing temporaries and lexicals from.
panic: pad_free curpad
(P) The compiler got confused about which scratchpad it was allocating and freeing temporaries and lexicals from.
panic: pad_free po
(P) An invalid scratchpad offset was detected internally.
panic: pad_reset curpad
(P) The compiler got confused about which scratchpad it was allocating and freeing temporaries and lexicals from.
panic: pad_sv po
(P) An invalid scratchpad offset was detected internally.
panic: pad_swipe curpad
(P) The compiler got confused about which scratchpad it was allocating and freeing temporaries and lexicals from.
panic: pad_swipe po
(P) An invalid scratchpad offset was detected internally.
panic: pp_iter
(P) The foreach
iterator got called in a
nonloop context frame.
panic: realloc
(P) Something requested a negative number of bytes of
realloc
.
panic: restartop
(P) Some internal routine requested a
goto
(or something like it) but didn't supply
the destination.
panic: return
(P) We popped the context stack to a subroutine or
eval
context and then discovered it wasn't a
subroutine or eval
context.
panic: scan_num
(P) Perl's internal scan_num
got called
on something that wasn't a number.
panic: sv_insert
(P) The sv_insert
routine was told to
remove more string than there was string.
panic: top_env
(P) The compiler attempted to do a goto
,
or something weird like that.
panic: yylex
(P) The lexer got into a bad state while processing a case modifier.
panic
: %s
(P) An internal error.
Parentheses missing around
"%s
"
list
(W parenthesis) You said something like:
my $foo, $bar = @_;
when you meant:
my ($foo, $bar) = @_;
Remember that my
, our
,
and local
bind tighter than the comma.
Perl %3.3f required--this is only version
%s
, stopped
(F) The module in question uses features of a version of Perl more recent than the currently running version. How long has it been since you upgraded, anyway?
PERL_SH_DIR too long
(F) This is an error peculiar to OS/2.
PERL_SH_DIR
is the directory that contains the
sh shell. See PERL_SH_DIR
in the README.os2 file bundled with the Perl
distribution.
Permission denied
(F) The setuid emulator in suidperl decided you were up to no good.
pid
%x
not a child
(W exec) This is a warning peculiar to VMS;
waitpid
was asked to wait for a process that
isn't a subprocess of the current process. While this is fine from
VMS's perspective, it's probably not what you intended.
POSIX getpgrp can't take an argument
(F) Your system has POSIX getpgrp
, which
takes no argument, unlike the BSD version, which takes a
PID.
Possible Y2K bug
:
%s
(W y2k) You are concatenating the number 19 with another number, which could be a potential year 2000 problem.
Possible attempt to put comments in qw()
list
(W qw) qw
lists contain items separated
by whitespace; as with literal strings, comment characters are not
ignored but are instead treated as literal data. (You may have
used delimiters other than the parentheses shown here; braces are
also frequently used.)
You probably wrote something like this:
@list = qw( a # a comment b # another comment );
when you should have written this:
@list = qw( a b );
If you really want comments, build your list the old-fashioned way, with quotes and commas:
@list = ( 'a', # a comment 'b', # another comment );
Possible attempt to separate words with
commas
(W qw) qw
lists contain items separated
by whitespace; therefore, commas aren't needed to separate the
items. (You may have used delimiters other than the parentheses
shown here; braces are also frequently used.)
You probably wrote something like this:
qw( a, b, c );
which puts literal commas into some of the list items. Write it without commas if you don't want them to appear in your data:
qw( a b c );
Possible memory corruption
:
%s
overflowed 3rd
argument
(F) An ioctl
or fcntl
returned more than Perl was bargaining for. Perl guesses a
reasonable buffer size but puts a sentinel byte at the end of the
buffer just in case. This sentinel byte got clobbered, and Perl
assumes that memory is now corrupted.
pragma "attrs" is deprecated, use "sub NAME : ATTRS"
instead
(W deprecated) You have written something like this:
sub doit { use attrs qw(locked); }
You should use the new declaration syntax instead:
sub doit : locked { …
The use attrs
pragma is now obsolete and
is only provided for backward compatibility.
Precedence problem: open
%s
should be
open(
%s
)
(S precedence) The old irregular construct:
open FOO || die;
is now misinterpreted as:
open(FOO || die);
because of the strict regularization of Perl 5's grammar
into unary and list operators. (The old open
was a little of both.) You must put parentheses around the
filehandle or use the new or
operator instead
of ||
.
Premature end of script headers
See Server error
.
print() on closed filehandle
%s
(W closed) The filehandle you're printing on got itself closed sometime before now. Check your logic flow.
printf() on closed filehandle
%s
(W closed) The filehandle you're writing to got itself closed sometime before now. Check your logic flow.
Process terminated by
SIG
%s
(W) This is a standard message issued by OS/2 applications,
while Unix applications die in silence. It is considered a feature
of the OS/2 port. One can easily disable this warning by setting
appropriate signal handlers. See also "Process terminated by
SIGTERM
/SIGINT
" in the
README.os2 file bundled with the Perl
distribution.
Prototype mismatch
:
%s
vs
%s
(S unsafe) The subroutine being declared or defined had previously been declared or defined with a different function prototype.
Range iterator outside integer range
(F) One (or both) of the numeric arguments of the range
operator .
. are outside the range that can be
represented by integers internally. One possible workaround is to
force Perl to use magical string increments by prepending
0
to your numbers.
readline() on closed filehandle
%s
(W closed) The filehandle you're reading from got itself closed sometime before now. Check your logic flow.
realloc() of freed memory ignored
(S malloc) An internal routine called
realloc
on something that had already been
freed.
Reallocation too large
:
%lx
(F) You can't allocate more than 64K on an MS-DOS machine.
Recompile perl with -DDEBUGGING to use -D
switch
(F debugging) You can't use the -D
option unless the code to produce the desired output is compiled
into Perl, which entails some overhead, which is why it's
currently left out of your copy.
Recursive inheritance detected in package
'%s
'(F) More than 100 levels of inheritance were used. This probably indicates an unintended loop in your inheritance hierarchy.
Recursive inheritance detected while looking for
method
'%s
' in package
'%s
'(F) More than 100 levels of inheritance were encountered while a method was invoked. This probably indicates an unintended loop in your inheritance hierarchy.
Reference found where even-sized list
expected
(W misc) You gave a single reference when Perl was expecting a list with an even number of elements (for assignment to a hash). This usually means that you used the anonymous hash constructor when you meant to use parens. In any case, a hash requires key/value pairs:
%hash = { one => 1, two => 2, }; # WRONG %hash = [ qw( an anon array /)]; # WRONG %hash = ( one => 1, two => 2, ); # right %hash = qw( one 1 two 2 ); # also fine
Reference is already weak
(W misc) You have attempted to weaken a reference that is already weak. Doing so has no effect.
Reference miscount in sv_replace()
(W internal) The internal sv_replace
function was handed a new SV with a reference count of other than
1.
regexp *+ operand could be empty
(F) The part of the regexp subject to either the
*
or +
quantifier could
match an empty string.
regexp memory corruption
(P) The regular expression engine got confused by what the regular expression compiler gave it.
regexp out of space
(P) This is a "can't happen" error, because
safemalloc
should have caught it
earlier.
Reversed
%s
= operator
(W syntax) You wrote your assignment operator backward. The
=
must always come last, to avoid ambiguity
with subsequent unary operators.
Runaway format
(F) Your format contained the ~~
repeat-until-blank sequence, but it produced 200 lines at once,
and the 200th line looked exactly like the 199th line. Apparently,
you didn't arrange for the arguments to exhaust themselves either
by using ^
instead of @
(for
scalar variables) or by shifting or popping (for array
variables).
Scalar value
@
%s
[
%s
]
better written as
$
%s
[
%s
]
(W syntax) You've used an array slice (indicated by
@
) to select a single element of an array.
Generally, it's better to ask for a scalar value (indicated by
$
). The difference is that
$foo[&bar]
always behaves like a scalar,
both when assigning to it and when evaluating its argument, while
@foo[&bar]
behaves like a list when you
assign to it and provides a list context to its subscript, which
can do weird things if you're expecting only one subscript.
On the other hand, if you were actually hoping to treat the array element as a list, you need to look into how references work, because Perl will not magically convert between scalars and lists for you.
Scalar value
@
%s
{
%s
}
better written as
$
%s
{
%s
}
(W syntax) You've used a hash slice (indicated by
@
) to select a single element of a hash.
Generally, it's better to ask for a scalar value (indicated by
$
). The difference is that
$foo{&bar}
always behaves like a scalar,
both when assigning to it and when evaluating its argument, while
@foo{&bar}
behaves like a list when you
assign to it, and provides a list context to its subscript, which
can do weird things if you're expecting only one subscript.
On the other hand, if you were actually hoping to treat the hash element as a list, you need to look into how references work, because Perl will not magically convert between scalars and lists for you.
Script is not setuid/setgid in
suidperl
(F) Oddly, the suidperl program was invoked on a script without a setuid or setgid bit set. This doesn't make much sense.
Search pattern not terminated
(F) The lexer couldn't find the final delimiter of a
//
or m{}
construct.
Remember that bracketing delimiters count nesting levels. Omitting
the leading $
from a variable
$m
may cause this error.
%s
seek() on unopened
file
(W unopened) You tried to use the seek
or
sysseek
function on a filehandle that either
was never opened or has since been closed.
select not implemented
(F) This machine doesn't implement the
select
system call.
sem
%s
not implemented
(F) You don't have System V semaphore IPC on your system.
semi-panic: attempt to dup freed
string
(S internal) The internal newSVsv
routine
was called to duplicate a scalar that had previously been marked
as free.
Semicolon seems to be missing
(W semicolon) A nearby syntax error was probably caused by a missing semicolon, or possibly some other missing operator, such as a comma.
send() on closed socket
%s
(W closed) The socket you're sending to got itself closed sometime before now. Check your logic flow.
Sequence (? incomplete
(F) A regular expression ended with an incomplete extension
(?
.
Sequence (?#… not terminated
(F) A regular expression comment must be terminated by a closing parenthesis. Embedded parentheses aren't allowed.
Sequence
(?
%s
…) not
implemented
(F) A proposed regular expression extension has reserved the character but has not yet been written.
Sequence
(?
%s
…) not
recognized
(F) You used a regular expression extension that doesn't make sense.
Server error
This is the error message generally seen in a browser window
when you try to run a CGI program (including SSI) over the web.
The actual error text varies widely from server to server. The
most frequently seen variants are "500 Server
error
", "Method
(something)
not
permitted
", "Document contains no
data
", "Premature end of script
headers
", and "Did not produce a valid
header
".
This is a CGI error, not a Perl error.
You need to make sure your script is executable, is
accessible by the user CGI is running the script under (which is
probably not the user account you tested it under), does not rely
on any environment variables (like PATH
) from
the user it isn't running under, and isn't in a location where the
CGI server can't find it, basically, more or less. Please see the
following for more information:
You should also look at the Perl FAQ.
setegid() not implemented
(F) You tried to assign to $)
, but your
operating system doesn't support the setegid
system call (or equivalent), or at least
Configure didn't think so.
seteuid() not implemented
(F) You tried to assign to $>
, but
your operating system doesn't support the
seteuid
system call (or equivalent), or at
least Configure didn't think so.
setpgrp can't take arguments
(F) Your system has the setpgrp
from BSD
4.2, which takes no arguments, unlike POSIX
setpgid
, which takes a process ID and process
group ID.
setrgid() not implemented
(F) You tried to assign to $(
, but your
operating system doesn't support the setrgid
system call (or equivalent), or at least
Configure didn't think so.
setruid() not implemented
(F) You tried to assign to $<
, but
your operating system doesn't support the
setruid
system call (or equivalent), or at
least Configure didn't think so.
setsockopt() on closed socket
%s
(W closed) You tried to set a socket option on a closed
socket. Did you forget to check the return value of your
socket
call?
Setuid/gid script is writable by
world
(F) The setuid emulator won't run a script that is writable by the world, because the world might have written on it already.
shm
%s
not implemented
(F) You don't have System V shared memory IPC on your system.
shutdown() on closed socket
%s
(W closed) You tried to do a shutdown on a closed socket. Seems a bit superfluous.
SIG
%s
handler
"%s
"
not defined
(W signal) The signal handler named in
%SIG
doesn't, in fact, exist. Perhaps you put
it into the wrong package?
sort is now a reserved word
(F) An ancient error message that almost nobody ever runs into anymore. But before sort was a keyword, people sometimes used it as a filehandle.
Sort subroutine didn't return a numeric
value
(F) A sort comparison routine must return a number. You
probably blew it by not using <=>
or
cmp
, or by not using them correctly.
Sort subroutine didn't return single
value
(F) A sort comparison subroutine cannot return a list value with more or less than one element.
Split loop
(P) The split
was looping infinitely.
(Obviously, a split
shouldn't iterate more
times than there are characters of input, which is what
happened.)
Stat on unopened file
>
%s
>
(W unopened) You tried to use the stat
function (or an equivalent file test) on a filehandle that either
was never opened or has since been closed.
Statement unlikely to be reached
(W exec) You did an exec
with some
statement after it other than a die
. This is
almost always an error, because exec
never
returns unless there was a failure. You probably wanted to use
system
instead, which does return. To suppress
this warning, put the exec
in a block by
itself.
Strange *+?{} on zero-length
expression
(W regexp) You applied a regular expression quantifier in a
place where it makes no sense, such as on a zero-width assertion.
Try putting the quantifier inside the assertion instead. For
example, the way to match abc
provided that it
is followed by three repetitions of xyz
is
/abc(?=(?:xyz){3})/
, not
/abc(?=xyz){3}/
.
Stub found while resolving method
`
%s
' overloading
`
%s
' in package
`
%s
'(P) Overloading resolution over @ISA
tree
may be broken by importation stubs. Stubs should never be
implicitly created, but explicit calls to can
may break this.
Subroutine
%s
redefined
(W redefine) You redefined a subroutine. To suppress this warning, say:
{ no warnings; eval "sub name { … }"; }
Substitution loop
(P) The substitution was looping infinitely. (Obviously, a substitution shouldn't iterate more times than there are characters of input, which is what happened.)
Substitution pattern not terminated
(F) The lexer couldn't find the interior delimiter of an
s///
or s{}{}
construct.
Remember that bracketing delimiters count nesting levels. Omitting
the leading $
from variable
$s
may cause this error.
Substitution replacement not
terminated
(F) The lexer couldn't find the final delimiter of an
s///
or s{}{}
construct.
Remember that bracketing delimiters count nesting levels. Omitting
the leading $
from variable
$s
may cause this error.
substr outside of string
(W substr|F) You tried to reference a
substr
that pointed outside of a string. That
is, the absolute value of the offset was larger than the length of
the string. This warning is fatal if substr
is
used in an lvalue context (as the lefthand side of an assignment
or as a subroutine argument, for example).
suidperl is no longer needed since
%s
(F) Your Perl was compiled with
-DSETUID_SCRIPTS_ARE_SECURE_NOW
, but a
version of the setuid emulator somehow got run anyway.
switching effective
%s
is not
implemented
(F) While under the use filetest
pragma,
we cannot switch the real and effective UIDs or GIDs.
syntax error
(F) This message probably means you had a syntax error. Common reasons include:
A keyword is misspelled.
A semicolon is missing.
A comma is missing.
An opening or closing parenthesis is missing.
An opening or closing brace is missing.
A closing quote is missing.
Often another error message will be associated with the
syntax error with more information. (Sometimes it helps to turn on
-w
.) The error message itself often tells
you where in the line Perl decided to give up. Sometimes the
actual error is several tokens before this, because Perl is good
at understanding random input. Occasionally, the line number may
be misleading, and once in a blue moon the only way to figure out
what's triggering the error is to call perl
-c repeatedly, chopping away half the program each time
to see if the error goes away. Sort of the cybernetic version of
20 questions.
syntax error at line
%d
:
`
%s
'
unexpected
(A) You've accidentally run your script through the Bourne
shell instead of Perl. Check the #!
line, or
manually feed your script into Perl yourself.
System V
%s
is not implemented on this machine
(F) You tried to do something with a function beginning with
sem
, shm
, or
msg
but System V IPC is not implemented in your
machine. (In some machines, the functionality can exist but may be
unconfigured.)
syswrite() on closed filehandle
%s
(W closed) The filehandle you're writing to got itself closed sometime before now. Check your logic flow.
Target of goto is too deeply nested
(F) You tried to use goto
to reach a
label that was too deeply nested for Perl to reach. Perl is doing
you a favor by refusing.
tell() on unopened file
(W unopened) You tried to use the tell
function on a filehandle that either was never opened or has since
been closed.
Test on unopened file
%s
(W unopened) You tried to invoke a file test operator on a filehandle that isn't open. Check your logic.
That use of $[ is unsupported
(F) Assignment to $[
is now strictly
circumscribed and interpreted as a compiler directive. You may say
only one of:
$[ = 0; $[ = 1; … local $[ = 0; local $[ = 1; …
This is to prevent the problem of one module inadvertently changing the array base out from under another module.
The
%s
function is unimplemented
The function indicated isn't implemented on this architecture, according to the probings of Configure.
The crypt() function is unimplemented due to
excessive paranoia
(F) Configure couldn't find the
crypt
function on your machine, probably
because your vendor didn't supply it, probably because they think
the U.S. government thinks it's a secret or at least will continue
to pretend that it is.
The stat preceding -l _ wasn't an
lstat
(F) It makes no sense to test the current stat buffer for
symbolic linkhood if the last stat
that wrote
to the stat buffer already went past the symlink to get to the
real file. Use an actual filename instead.
This Perl can't reset CRTL environ elements
(
%s
)
This Perl can't set CRTL environ elements
(
%s
=
%s
)
(W internal) These are warnings peculiar to VMS. You tried
to change or delete an element of the CRTL's internal environ
array, but your copy of Perl wasn't built with a CRTL that
contained the internal setenv
function. You'll
need to rebuild Perl with a CRTL that does, or redefine
PERL_ENV_TABLES
(see
perlvms (1)) so that the environ
array isn't the target of the change to %ENV
that produced the warning.
times not implemented
(F) Your version of the C library apparently doesn't do
times
. I suspect you're not running on
Unix.
Too few args to syscall
(F) There has to be at least one argument to
syscall
to specify the system call to call,
silly dilly.
Too late for "-T" option
(X) The #!
line (or local equivalent) in
a Perl script contains the -T
option, but
Perl was not invoked with -T
in its command
line. This is an error because by the time Perl discovers a
-T
in a script, it's too late to properly
taint everything from the environment. So Perl gives up.
If the Perl script is being executed as a command using the
#!
mechanism (or its local equivalent), this
error can usually be fixed by editing the #!
line so that the -T
option is a part of
Perl's first argument: e.g., change perl -n -T
to perl -T -n
.
If the Perl script is being executed as perl
scriptname, then the -T
option
must appear on the command line: perl -T
scriptname.
Too late for
"-
%s
"
option
(X) The #!
line (or local equivalent) in
a Perl script contains the -M
or
-m
option. This is an error because
-M
and -m
options
are not intended for use inside scripts. Use a
use
declaration instead.
Too late to run
%s
block
(W void) A CHECK
or
INIT
block is being defined during run time
proper, when the opportunity to run them has already passed.
Perhaps you are loading a file with require
or
do
when you should be using
use
instead. Or perhaps you should put the
require
or do
inside a
BEGIN
block.
Too many ('s
Too many )'s
(A) You've accidentally run your script through
csh instead of Perl. Check the
#!
line, or manually feed your script into Perl
yourself.
Too many args to syscall
(F) Perl supports a maximum of only 14 arguments to
syscall
.
Too many arguments for
%s
(F) The function requires fewer arguments than you specified.
trailing in regexp
(F) The regular expression ends with an unbackslashed backslash. Backslash it.
Transliteration pattern not
terminated
(F) The lexer couldn't find the interior delimiter of a
tr///
or tr[][]
or
y///
or y[][]
construct.
Omitting the leading $
from variables
$tr
or $y
may cause this
error.
Transliteration replacement not
terminated
(F) The lexer couldn't find the final delimiter of a
tr///
or tr[][]
construct.
truncate not implemented
(F) Your machine doesn't implement a file truncation mechanism that Configure knows about.
Type of arg
%d
to
%s
must
be
%s
(not
%s
)
(F) This function requires the argument in that position to
be of a certain type. Arrays must be
@
NAME
or
@
{EXPR}
. Hashes must
be %
NAME
or
%{
EXPR
}
.
No implicit dereferencing is allowed--use the
{
EXPR
}
form as an explicit dereference.
umask: argument is missing initial 0
(W umask) A umask of 222
is incorrect. It
should be 0222
because octal literals always
start with 0
in Perl, as in C.
umask not implemented
(F) Your machine doesn't implement the
umask
function, and you tried to use it to
restrict permissions for yourself (EXPR
& 0700
).
Unable to create sub named
"%s
"(F) You attempted to create or access a subroutine with an illegal name.
Unbalanced context
:
%d
more PUSHes than
POPs
(W internal) The exit code detected an internal inconsistency in how many execution contexts were entered and left.
Unbalanced saves
:
%d
more saves than
restores
(W internal) The exit code detected an internal inconsistency in how many values were temporarily localized.
Unbalanced scopes
:
%d
more ENTERs than
LEAVEs
(W internal) The exit code detected an internal inconsistency in how many blocks were entered and left.
Unbalanced tmps
:
%d
more allocs than
frees
(W internal) The exit code detected an internal inconsistency in how many mortal scalars were allocated and freed.
Undefined format
"%s
"
called
(F) The format indicated doesn't seem to exist. Perhaps it's really in another package?
Undefined sort subroutine
"%s
"
called
(F) The sort comparison routine specified doesn't seem to exist. Perhaps it's in a different package?
Undefined subroutine
&
%s
called
(F) The subroutine indicated hasn't been defined, or if it was, it has since been undefined.
Undefined subroutine called
(F) The anonymous subroutine you're trying to call hasn't been defined, or if it was, it has since been undefined.
Undefined subroutine in sort
(F) The sort comparison routine specified is declared but doesn't seem to have been defined yet.
Undefined top format
"%s
"
called
(F) The format indicated doesn't seem to exist. Perhaps it's really in another package?
Undefined value assigned to typeglob
(W misc) An undefined value was assigned to a typeglob, such
as *foo = undef
. This does nothing. It's
possible that you really mean undef
*foo
.
unexec of
%s
into
%s
failed!
(F) The unexec
routine failed for some
reason. See your local FSF representative, who probably put it
there in the first place.
Unknown BYTEORDER
(F) There are no byte-swapping functions for a machine with this byte order.
Unknown open() mode
'%s
'(F) The second argument of three-argument
open
is not in the list of valid modes:
<
, >
,
>>
, +<
,
+>
, +>>
,
-|
, |-
.
Unknown process
%x
sent message to
prime_env_iter
: %s
(P) This is an error peculiar to VMS. Perl was reading
values for %ENV
before iterating over it, and
someone else stuck a message in the stream of data Perl expected.
Someone's very confused, or perhaps trying to subvert Perl's
population of %ENV
for nefarious
purposes.
unmatched () in regexp
(F) Unbackslashed parentheses must always be balanced in
regular expressions. If you're a vi user, the
%
key is valuable for finding the matching
parenthesis.
Unmatched right
%s
bracket
(F) The lexer counted more closing curly or square brackets than opening ones, so you're probably missing a matching opening bracket. As a general rule, you'll find the missing one (so to speak) near the place you were last editing.
unmatched [] in regexp
(F) The brackets around a character class must match. If you wish to include a closing bracket in a character class, backslash it or put it first.
Unquoted string
"%s
" may clash with
future reserved word
(W reserved) You used a bareword that might someday be claimed as a reserved word. It's best to put such a word in quotes, or capitalize it somehow, or insert an underbar into it. You might also declare it as a subroutine.
Unrecognized character
%s
(F) The Perl parser has no idea what to do with the
specified character in your Perl script (or
eval
). Perhaps you tried to run a compressed
script, a binary program, or a directory as a Perl program.
Unrecognized escape \%c passed
through
(W misc) You used a backslash-character combination that is not recognized by Perl.
Unrecognized signal name
"%s
"(F) You specified a signal name to the
kill
function that was not recognized. Say
kill -l in your shell to see the valid signal
names on your system.
Unrecognized switch:
-
%s
(-h will show
valid options)
(F) You specified an illegal option to Perl. Don't do that.
(If you think you didn't do that, check the #!
line to see if it's supplying the bad switch on your
behalf.)
Unsuccessful
%s
on filename containing newline
(W newline) A file operation was attempted on a filename,
and that operation failed, probably because the filename contained
a newline, probably because you forgot to chop
or chomp
it off.
Unsupported directory function
"%s
"
called
(F) Your machine doesn't support opendir
and readdir
.
Unsupported function fork
(F) Your version of executable does not support forking.
Note that under some systems, like OS/2, there may be
different flavors of Perl executables, some of which may support
fork
, some not. Try changing the name you call
Perl by to perl_
, perl__
,
and so on.
Unsupported function
%s
(F) This machine doesn't implement the indicated function, apparently. At least, Configure doesn't think so.
Unsupported socket function
"%s
"
called
(F) Your machine doesn't support the Berkeley socket mechanism, or at least that's what Configure thought.
Unterminated <> operator
(F) The lexer saw a left angle bracket in a place where it
was expecting a term, so it's looking for the corresponding right
angle bracket and not finding it. Chances are you left some needed
parentheses out earlier in the line, and you really meant a
<
symbol.
Unterminated attribute parameter in attribute
list
(F) The lexer saw an opening (left) parenthesis character while parsing an attribute list, but the matching closing (right) parenthesis character was not found. You may need to add (or remove) a backslash character to get your parentheses to balance.
Unterminated attribute list
(F) The lexer found something other than a simple identifier at the start of an attribute, and it wasn't a semicolon or the start of a block. Perhaps you terminated the parameter list of the previous attribute too soon.
Use of $# is deprecated
(D deprecated) This was an ill-advised attempt to emulate a
poorly defined awk feature. Use an explicit
printf
or sprintf
instead.
Use of $* is deprecated
(D deprecated) This variable magically activated multiline
pattern matching, both for you and for any luckless subroutine
that you happen to call. You should use the //m
and //s
modifiers now to do that without the
dangerous action-at-a-distance effects of
$*
.
Use of
%s
in printf format not supported
(F) You attempted to use a feature of
printf
that is accessible from only C. This
usually means there's a better way to do it in Perl.
Use of bare << to mean <<"" is
deprecated
(D deprecated) You are now encouraged to use the explicitly quoted form if you wish to use an empty line as the terminator of the here document.
Use of implicit split to @_ is
deprecated
(D deprecated) You make a lot of work for the compiler when
you clobber a subroutine's argument list, so it's better to assign
the results of a split
explicitly to an array
(or list).
Use of inherited AUTOLOAD for non-method
%s
() is
deprecated
(D deprecated) As an (ahem) accidental feature,
AUTOLOAD
subroutines were looked up as methods
(using the @ISA
hierarchy) even when the
subroutines to be autoloaded were called as plain functions (e.g.,
Foo::bar()
), not as methods (e.g.,
Foo->bar()
or
$obj->bar()
).
This bug was rectified in Perl 5.005, which used method
lookup only for methods' AUTOLOAD
s. However, a
significant base of existing code may be using the old behavior.
So, as an interim step, Perl 5.004 issued this optional warning
when nonmethods used inherited
AUTOLOAD
s.
The simple rule is this: inheritance will not work when
autoloading nonmethods. The simple fix for old code is this: in
any module that used to depend on inheriting
AUTOLOAD
for nonmethods from a base class named
BaseClass
, execute *AUTOLOAD =
&BaseClass::AUTOLOAD
during startup.
In code that currently says use AutoLoader; @ISA =
qw(AutoLoader);
, you should remove
AutoLoader
from @ISA
and
change use AutoLoader;
to use
AutoLoader 'AUTOLOAD';
.
Use of reserved word
"%s
" is
deprecated
(D deprecated) The indicated bareword is a reserved word.
Future versions of Perl may use it as a keyword, so you're better
off either explicitly quoting the word in a manner appropriate for
its context of use, or using a different name altogether. The
warning can be suppressed for subroutine names by either adding an
&
prefix or using a package qualifier,
e.g., &our()
or
Foo::our()
.
Use of
%s
is deprecated
(D deprecated) The construct indicated is no longer recommended, generally because there's a better way to do it, and also because the old way has bad side effects.
Use of uninitialized
value
%s
(W uninitialized) An undefined value was used as if it were
already defined. It was interpreted as a "" or a
0
, but maybe it was a mistake. To suppress this
warning assign a defined value to your variables.
Useless use of "re" pragma
(W) You did a use re
without any
arguments. That isn't very useful.
Useless use of
%s
in void
context
(W void) You did something without a side effect in a context that does nothing with the return value, such as a statement that doesn't return a value from a block or the left side of a scalar comma operator. For example, you'd get this if you mixed up your C precedence with Python precedence and said:
$one, $two = 1, 2;
when you meant to say:
($one, $two) = (1, 2);
Another common error is using ordinary parentheses to construct a list reference when you should be using square or curly brackets, for example, if you say:
$array = (1,2);
when you should have said:
$array = [1,2];
The square brackets explicitly turn a list value into a scalar value, while parentheses do not. So when a parenthesized list is evaluated in a scalar context, the comma is treated like C's comma operator, which throws away the left argument, which is not what you want.
untie attempted while
%d
inner references still
exist
(W untie) A copy of the object returned from
tie
(or tied
) was still
valid when untie
was called.
Value of
%s
can be "0"; test with defined()
(W misc) In a conditional expression, you used
<HANDLE>
, <*>
(glob), each
, or readdir
as
a Boolean value. Each of these constructs can return a value of
"0
"; that would make the conditional expression
false, which is probably not what you intended. When using these
constructs in conditional expressions, test their values with the
defined
operator.
Value of CLI symbol
"%s
" too
long
(W misc) This is a warning peculiar to VMS. Perl tried to
read the value of an %ENV
element from a CLI
symbol table and found a resultant string longer than 1,024
characters. The return value has been truncated to 1,024
characters.
Variable
"%s
" is not
imported
%s
(F) While use strict
in effect, you
referred to a global variable that you apparently thought was
imported from another module, because something else of the same
name (usually a subroutine) is exported by that module. It usually
means you put the wrong funny character on the front of your
variable.
Variable
"%s
" may be
unavailable
(W closure) An inner (nested) anonymous subroutine is inside a named subroutine, and outside that is another subroutine; and the anonymous (innermost) subroutine is referencing a lexical variable defined in the outermost subroutine. For example:
sub outermost { my $a; sub middle { sub { $a } } }
If the anonymous subroutine is called or referenced (directly or indirectly) from the outermost subroutine, it will share the variable as you would expect. But if the anonymous subroutine is called or referenced when the outermost subroutine is not active, it will see the value of the shared variable as it was before and during the first call to the outermost subroutine, which is probably not what you want.
In these circumstances, it is usually best to make the
middle subroutine anonymous, using the sub {}
syntax. Perl has specific support for shared variables in nested
anonymous subroutines; a named subroutine in between interferes
with this feature.
Variable
"%s
" will not stay
shared
(W closure) An inner (nested) named subroutine is referencing a lexical variable defined in an outer subroutine.
When the inner subroutine is called, it will probably see the value of the outer subroutine's variable as it was before and during the first call to the outer subroutine; in this case, after the first call to the outer subroutine is complete, the inner and outer subroutines will no longer share a common value for the variable. In other words, the variable will no longer be shared.
Furthermore, if the outer subroutine is anonymous and references a lexical variable outside itself, then the outer and inner subroutines will never share the given variable.
This problem can usually be solved by making the inner
subroutine anonymous, using the sub {}
syntax.
When inner anonymous subs that reference variables in outer
subroutines are called or referenced, they are automatically
rebound to the current values of such variables.
Variable syntax
(A) You've accidentally run your script through
csh instead of Perl. Check the
#!
line, or manually feed your script into Perl
yourself.
Version number must be a constant
number
(P) The attempt to translate a use Module n.n
LIST
statement into its equivalent
BEGIN
block found an internal inconsistency
with the version number.
perl: warning: Setting locale
failed
.(S) The whole warning message will look something like:
perl: warning: Setting locale failed. perl: warning: Please check that your locale settings: LC_ALL = "En_US", LANG = (unset) are supported and installed on your system. perl: warning: Falling back to the standard locale ("C").
(Which locale settings failed will vary.) This error means that Perl detected that you or your system administrator have set up the so-called variable system but Perl could not use those settings. This was not dead serious, fortunately: there is a "default locale" called "C" that Perl can and will use, so the script will be run. Before you really fix the problem, however, you will get the same error message each time you run Perl. How to really fix the problem can be found in perllocale (1), under the section "Locale Problems".
Warning: something's wrong
(W) You passed warn
an empty string (the
equivalent of warn "
"), or you called it with
no arguments and $_
was empty.
Warning: unable to close filehandle
%s
properly
(S) The implicit close
done by an
open
got an error indication on the
close
. This usually indicates your filesystem
ran out of disk space.
Warning: Use of
"%s
" without
parentheses is ambiguous
(S ambiguous) You wrote a unary operator followed by
something that looks like a binary operator but could also be
interpreted as a term or unary operator. For instance, if you know
that the rand
function has a default argument
of 1.0
, and you write:
rand + 5;
you may think you wrote the same thing as:
rand() + 5;
but in actual fact, you got:
rand(+5);
So use parentheses to say what you really mean.
write() on closed filehandle
%s
(W closed) The filehandle you're writing to got itself closed sometime before now. Check your logic flow.
X outside of string
(F) You had a pack
template that
specified a relative position before the beginning of the string
being unpacked.
x outside of string
(F) You had a pack
template that
specified a relative position after the end of the string being
unpacked.
Xsub
"%s
" called in
sort
(F) The use of an external subroutine as a sort comparison is not yet supported.
Xsub called in sort
(F) The use of an external subroutine as a sort comparison is not yet supported.
You can't use -l on a filehandle
(F) A filehandle represents an opened file, and when you opened the file, it already went past any symlink you are presumably trying to look for. Use a filename instead.
YOU HAVEN'T DISABLED SET-ID SCRIPTS IN THE KERNEL
YET!
(F) And you probably never will, because you probably don't
have the sources to your kernel, and your vendor probably doesn't
give a rip about what you want. Your best bet is to put a setuid C
wrapper around your script with the wrapsuid
script in the eg
directory of the Perl
distribution.
You need to quote
"%s
"(W syntax) You assigned a bareword as a signal handler name.
Unfortunately, you already have a subroutine of that name
declared, which means that Perl 5 will try to call the subroutine
when the assignment is executed, which is probably not what you
want. (If it is what you want, put an
&
in front.)