NAME
perldiag - various Perl diagnostics
DESCRIPTION
These messages are classified as follows (listed in increasing order of desperation):
(W) A warning (optional).
(D) A deprecation (optional).
(S) A severe warning (default).
(F) A fatal error (trappable).
(P) An internal error 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 & S) can be controlled using the warnings pragma.
If a message can be controlled by the warnings pragma, its warning
category is included with the classification letter in the description
below.
Optional warnings are enabled by using the warnings pragma or the -w
and -W switches. Warnings may be captured by setting $SIG{__WARN__}
to a reference to a routine that will be called on each warning instead
of printing it. See perlvar.
Default warnings are always enabled unless they are explicitly disabled
with the warnings pragma or the -X switch.
Trappable errors may be trapped using the eval operator. See
"eval" at perlfunc. In almost all cases, warnings may be selectively
disabled or promoted to fatal errors using the warnings pragma.
See warnings.
The messages are in alphabetical order, without regard to upper or lower-case. Some of these messages are generic. Spots that vary are denoted with a %s or other printf-style escape. These escapes are ignored by the alphabetical order, as are all characters other than letters. To look up your message, just ignore anything that is not a letter.
- accept() on closed socket %s
- Allocation too large: %lx
- '!' allowed only after types %s
- Ambiguous call resolved as CORE::%s(), qualify as such or use &
- Ambiguous range in transliteration operator
- Ambiguous use of %s resolved as %s
- '|' and '<' may not both be specified on command line
- '|' and '>' may not both be specified on command line
(W closed) You tried to do an accept on a closed socket. Did you forget to check the return value of your socket() call? See "accept" at perlfunc.
(X) You can't allocate more than 64K on an MS-DOS machine.
(F) The '!' is allowed in pack() or unpack() only after certain types. See "pack" at perlfunc.
(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 builtin 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 (see "Subroutine Attributes" at perlsub or
attributes).
(F) You wrote something like tr/a-z-0//
which doesn't mean anything at
all. To include a -
character in a transliteration, put it either
first or last. (In the past, tr/a-z-0//
was synonymous with
tr/a-y//
, which was probably not what you would have expected.)
(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, parenthesis pair or declaration.
(F) An error peculiar to VMS. Perl does its own command line redirection, and found that STDIN was a pipe, and that you also tried to redirect STDIN using '<'. Only one STDIN stream to a customer, please.
(F) 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 which 'splits' 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;
(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. See "grep" at perlfunc and "map" at perlfunc for
alternatives.
(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
.
(F) msgsnd() requires a string at least as long as sizeof(long).
(F) The argument to exists() must be a hash or array element, such as:
$foo{$bar}
$ref->{"susie"}[12](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"}(F) The argument to exists() for exists &sub
must be a subroutine
name, and not a subroutine call. exists &sub()
will generate this
error.
(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.
(W layer) When pushing a layer with arguments onto the Perl I/O system you forgot the ) that closes the argument list. (Layers take care of transforming data between external and internal representations.) Perl stopped parsing the layer list at this point and did not attempt to push this layer. If your program didn't explicitly request the failing operation, it may be the result of the value of the environment variable PERLIO.
(D deprecated) Really old Perl let you omit the @ on array names in some spots. This is now heavily deprecated.
(P) The malloc package that comes with Perl had an internal failure.
(P) A general assertion failed. The file in question must be examined.
(F) If you assign to a conditional operator, the 2nd and 3rd arguments must either both be scalars or both be lists. Otherwise Perl won't know which context to supply to the right side.
(W) When using threaded Perl, a thread (not necessarily the main thread) exited while there were still other threads running. Usually it's a good idea to first collect the return values of the created threads by joining them, and only then exit from the main thread. See threads.
(F) The failing code has attempted to get or set a key which is not in the current set of allowed keys of a restricted hash.
(F) The CLASSNAME argument to the bless() operator is expected to be the name of the package to bless the resulting object into. You've supplied instead a reference to something: perhaps you wrote
bless $self, $proto;
when you intended
bless $self, ref($proto) || $proto;
If you actually want to bless into the stringified version of the reference supplied, you need to stringify it yourself, for example by:
bless $self, "$proto";
(F) The failing code attempted to delete from a restricted hash a key which is not in its key set.
(F) The failing code attempted to delete a key whose value has been declared readonly from a restricted hash.
(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.
(P internal) Perl maintains a reference counted internal table of strings to optimize the storage and access of hash keys and other strings. This indicates someone tried to decrement the reference count of a string that can no longer be found in the table.
(W debugging) Mortalized values are supposed to be freed by the free_tmps() routine. This 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.
(P internal) The reference counts got screwed up on symbol aliases.
(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.
(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.
(W pack) You tried to pass a temporary value (like the result of a function, or a computed expression) to the "p" 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" pack() template to avoid this warning.
(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. See "substr" at perlfunc.
(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 *).
(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 '}'.
(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.
(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 0.
This message can be seen quite often with DB_File on systems with "hard"
dynamic linking, like AIX
and OS/2
. It is a bug of Berkeley DB
which is left unnoticed if DB uses forgiving system malloc().
(P) One of the internal hash routines was passed a null HV pointer.
(F) The index looked up in the hash found as the 0'th element of a pseudo-hash is not legal. Index values must be at 1 or greater. See perlref.
(A) You've accidentally run your script through csh instead of Perl. Check the #! line, or manually feed your script into Perl yourself.
(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";
(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.
(P) An internal request asked to add an array entry to something that wasn't a symbol table entry.
(P) An internal request asked to add a filehandle entry to something that wasn't a symbol table entry.
(P) An internal request asked to add a hash entry to something that wasn't a symbol table entry.
(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.
(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?
(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?
(F) An untrapped exception was raised while executing a BEGIN subroutine. Compilation stops immediately and the interpreter is exited.
(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.
(W syntax) Outside of patterns, backreferences live on as variables. The use of backslashes is grandfathered on the right-hand 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 9 backreferences.
(W portable) The binary number you specified is larger than 2**32-1 (4294967295) and therefore non-portable between systems. See perlport for more on portability concerns.
(W closed) You tried to do a bind on a closed socket. Did you forget to check the return value of your socket() call? See "bind" at perlfunc.
(W unopened) You tried binmode() on a filehandle that was never opened. Check you control flow and number of arguments.
(W portable) Using bit vector sizes larger than 32 is non-portable.
(P) Perl detected an attempt to copy an internal value that is not copyable.
(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.
(F) A subroutine invoked from an external package via call_sv() exited by calling exit.
(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. See perlsub.
(F) An argument to pack("w",...) was too large to compress. The BER compressed integer format can only be used with positive integers, and you attempted to compress Infinity or a very large number (> 1e308). See "pack" at perlfunc.
(F) An argument to pack("w",...) was negative. The BER compressed integer format can only be used with positive integers. See "pack" at perlfunc.
(F) An argument to pack("w",...) was not an integer. The BER compressed integer format can only be used with positive integers, and you attempted to compress something else. See "pack" at perlfunc.
(F) Only hard references may be blessed. This is how Perl "enforces" encapsulation of objects. See perlobj.
(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. See perlobj.
(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);
(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. See perlobj.
(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 which 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);
(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.
(P) For some reason you can't check the filesystem of the script for nosuid.
(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.
(F) Certain types of SVs, in particular real 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.
(F) Certain types of SVs, in particular real symbol table entries (typeglobs), can't be forced to stop being what they are.
(F) Certain types of SVs, in particular real symbol table entries (typeglobs), can't be forced to stop being what they are.
(P) An error peculiar to VMS. The process is suffering from exhausted quotas or other plumbing problems.
(F) Currently, only scalar variables can be declared with a specific class qualifier in a "my" or "our" declaration. The semantics may be extended for other types of variables in future.
(F) Only scalar, array, and hash variables may be declared as "my" or "our" variables. They must have ordinary identifiers as names.
(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.
(S inplace) The creation of the new file failed for the indicated reason.
(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.
(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.
(F) Minima must be less than or equal to maxima. If you really want your regexp to match something 0 times, just put {0}. The <-- HERE shows in the regular expression about where the problem was discovered. See perlre.
(P) The setegid() call failed for some reason in the setuid emulator of suidperl.
(P) The setuid emulator of suidperl failed for some reason.
(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 he and/or she removed it.
(F) This machine doesn't have either waitpid() or wait4(), so only waitpid() without flags is emulated.
(F) The #! line specifies a switch that doesn't make sense at this point. For example, it'd be kind of silly to put a -x on the #! line.
(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.)
(F) Perl was trying to execute the indicated program for you because that's what the #! line said. If that's not what you wanted, you may need to mention "perl" on the #! line somewhere.
(F) You used the -S switch, but the copies of the script to execute found in the PATH did not have correct permissions.
(F) A string of a form CORE::word
was given to prototype(), but there
is no builtin with the name word
.
(F) You used \p{}
or \P{}
but the character property by that name
could not be found. Maybe you misspelled the name of the property
(remember that the names of character properties consist only of
alphanumeric characters), or maybe you forgot the Is
or In
prefix?
(F) You said to goto a label that isn't mentioned anywhere that it's possible for us to go to. See "goto" at perlfunc.
(F) You used the -S switch, but the script to execute could not be found in the 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.
(F) You may have tried to use \p
which means a Unicode property (for
example \p{Lu}
is all uppercase letters). If you did mean to use a
Unicode property, see perlunicode for the list of known properties.
If you didn't mean to use a Unicode property, escape the \p
, either
by \\p
(just the \p
) or by \Q\p
(the rest of the string, until
possible \E
).
(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.
(F) A fatal error occurred while trying to fork while opening a pipeline.
(S) A warning 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 this works only
if you haven't made a subsequent call to the CRTL stat() routine,
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.)
(P) An error peculiar to VMS. After creating a mailbox to act as a pipe, Perl can't retrieve its name for later use.
(P) An error peculiar to VMS. Perl asked $GETSYI how big you want your mailbox buffers to be, and didn't get an answer.
(F) A "goto" statement was executed to jump into the middle of a foreach loop. You can't get there from here. See "goto" at perlfunc.
(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. See "goto" at perlfunc.
(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.)
(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. See "goto" at perlfunc.
(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.
(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, as doesn't 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. See "last" at perlfunc.
(F) The module you tried to load failed to load a dynamic extension. This may either mean that you upgraded your version of perl to one that is incompatible with your old dynamic extensions (which is known to happen between major versions of perl), or (more likely) that your dynamic extension was built against an older version of the library that is installed on your system. You may need to rebuild your old dynamic extensions.
(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.
(F) You said something like local $ar->{'key'}
, where $ar is a
reference to a pseudo-hash. 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'}]
.
(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.
(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 file name 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. See
"require" at perlfunc and lib.
(F) A function (or method) was called in a package which allows
autoload, 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
.
(F) The module you loaded is trying to load an external library, like
for example, foo.so
or bar.dll
, but the DynaLoader module was
unable to locate this library. See DynaLoader.
(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. See perlobj.
(W syntax) The @ISA array contained the name of another package that doesn't seem to exist.
(F) You tried to use in open() a PerlIO layer that does not exist, e.g. open(FH, ">:nosuchlayer", "somefile").
(F) List assignment to %ENV is not supported on some systems, notably VMS.
(F) You aren't allowed to assign to the item indicated, or otherwise try to change it, such as with an auto-increment.
(P) The internal routine that does assignment to a substr() was handed a NULL.
(F) Subroutines meant to be used in lvalue context should be declared as such, see "Lvalue subroutines" at perlsub.
(F) The target of a msgrcv must be modifiable to be used as a receive buffer.
(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, as doesn't 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. See "next" at perlfunc.
(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.
(W io) You tried to open a scalar reference for reading or writing, using the 3-arg open() syntax :
open FH, '>', $ref;
but your version of perl is compiled without perlio, and this form of open is not supported.
(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. Alternately, direct the pipe's output to a file using
">", and then read it in under a different file handle.
(F) An error peculiar to VMS. Perl does its own command line redirection, and couldn't open the file specified after '2>' or '2>>' on the command line for writing.
(F) An error peculiar to VMS. Perl does its own command line redirection, and couldn't open the file specified after '<' on the command line for reading.
(F) An error peculiar to VMS. Perl does its own command line redirection, and couldn't open the file specified after '>' or '>>' on the command line for writing.
(P) An error peculiar to VMS. Perl does its own command line redirection, and couldn't open the pipe into which to send data destined for stdout.
(F) The script you specified can't be opened for the indicated reason.
If you're debugging a script that uses #!, and normally relies on the
shell's $PATH search, the -S option causes perl to do that search, so
you don't have to type the path or `which $scriptname`
.
(S) 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) so that environ is not searched.
(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
.
(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, as doesn't 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. See "redo" at perlfunc.
(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.
(S inplace) The rename done by the -i switch failed for some reason, probably because you don't have write permission to the directory.
(P) An error peculiar to VMS. Perl thought stdin was a pipe, and tried to reopen it to accept binary data. Alas, it failed.
(F|P) Error resolving overloading specified by a method name (as opposed
to a subroutine reference): no such method callable via the package. If
method name is ???, this is an internal error.
(P) The setreuid() call failed for some reason in the setuid emulator of suidperl.
(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.
(F) The return statement was executed in mainline code, that is, where there was no subroutine call to return out of. See perlsub.
(F) You tried to return a complete array or hash from an lvalue subroutine, but you called the subroutine in a way that made Perl think you meant to return only one value. You probably meant to write parentheses around the call to the subroutine, which tell Perl that the call should be in list context.
(P) For some reason you can't fstat() the script even though you have it open already. Bizarre.
(P) The setreuid() call failed for some reason in the setuid emulator of suidperl.
(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.
(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.
(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.
(F) You tried to unshift an "unreal" array that can't be unshifted, such as the main Perl stack.
(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.
(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.
(P) The internal routine that does method lookup was handed a symbol
table that doesn't have a name. Symbol tables can become anonymous
for example by undefining stashes: undef %Some::Package::
.
(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.
(F) Only hard references are allowed by "strict refs". Symbolic references are disallowed. See perlref.
(F) The first time the %! hash is used, perl automatically loads the
Errno.pm module. The Errno module is expected to tie the %! hash to
provide symbolic names for $!
errno values.
(F) Only a simple scalar variable may be used as a loop variable on a foreach.
(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.
(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.
(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.
(F) Only hard references are allowed by "strict refs". Symbolic references are disallowed. See perlref.
(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.
(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.
(F) You attempted to weaken something that was not a reference. Only references can be weakened.
(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, and repeat that.
(W pack) You said
pack("C", $x)
where $x is either less than 0 or more than 255; the "C"
format is
only for encoding native operating system characters (ASCII, EBCDIC,
and so on) and not for Unicode characters, so Perl behaved as if you meant
pack("C", $x & 255)
If you actually want to pack Unicode codepoints, use the "U"
format
instead.
(W pack) You said
pack("c", $x)
where $x is either less than -128 or more than 127; the "c"
format
is only for encoding native operating system characters (ASCII, EBCDIC,
and so on) and not for Unicode characters, so Perl behaved as if you meant
pack("c", $x & 255);
If you actually want to pack Unicode codepoints, use the "U"
format
instead.
(W unopened) You tried to close a filehandle that was never opened.
(F) You had a (sub-)template that ends with a '/'. There must be another template code following the slash. See "pack" at perlfunc.
(A) You've accidentally run your script through csh instead of Perl. Check the #! line, or manually feed your script into Perl yourself.
(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.
(W regexp) The regular expression engine uses recursion in complex
situations where back-tracking is required. Recursion depth is limited
to 32766, 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. (See perlfaq2 for information
on Mastering Regular Expressions.)
(W threads) Within a thread-enabled program, you tried to call cond_broadcast() on a variable which wasn't locked. The cond_broadcast() function is used to wake up another thread that is waiting in a cond_wait(). To ensure that the signal isn't sent before the other thread has a chance to enter the wait, it is usual for the signaling thread to first wait for a lock on variable. This lock attempt will only succeed after the other thread has entered cond_wait() and thus relinquished the lock.
(W threads) Within a thread-enabled program, you tried to call cond_signal() on a variable which wasn't locked. The cond_signal() function is used to wake up another thread that is waiting in a cond_wait(). To ensure that the signal isn't sent before the other thread has a chance to enter the wait, it is usual for the signaling thread to first wait for a lock on variable. This lock attempt will only succeed after the other thread has entered cond_wait() and thus relinquished the lock.
(W closed) You tried to do a connect on a closed socket. Did you forget to check the return value of your socket() call? See "connect" at perlfunc.
(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? See charnames and
overload.
(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.
See "Constant Functions" at perlsub and constant.
(S) You redefined a subroutine which had previously been eligible for inlining. See "Constant Functions" at perlsub for commentary and workarounds.
(W misc) You undefined a subroutine which had previously been eligible for inlining. See "Constant Functions" at perlsub for commentary and workarounds.
(F) The method which overloads "=" is buggy. See "Copy Constructor" at overload.
(F) The CORE:: namespace is reserved for Perl keywords.
(P) The regular expression engine got confused by what the regular expression compiler gave it.
(P) The regular expression engine got passed a regexp program without a valid magic number.
(P) The malloc package that comes with Perl had an internal failure.
(F) You had an unpack template indicating a counted-length string, but you have also specified an explicit size for the string. See "pack" at perlfunc.
(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.
(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 } for example.
(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 } for example.
(F) You said something like "use Module 42" but in the Module file
there are neither package declarations nor a $VERSION
.
(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.
(F) A DESTROY() method created a new reference to the object which is just being DESTROYed. Perl is confused, and prefers to abort rather than to create a dangling reference.
See Server error.
(F) A required (or used) 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. See "require" at perlfunc.
(W) You probably referred to an imported subroutine &FOO as $FOO or some such.
(W misc) Remember that "our" does not localize the declared global variable. You have declared it again in the same lexical scope, which seems superfluous.
(W) You probably said %hash{$key} when you meant $hash{$key} or @hash{@keys}. On the other hand, maybe you just meant %hash and got carried away.
(F) You passed die() an empty string (the equivalent of die ""
) or
you called it with no args and both $@
and $_
were empty.
See Server error.
(F) You said something like "use Module 42" but the Module did not
define a $VERSION.
(F) You cannot put a repeat count of any kind right after the '/' code. See "pack" at perlfunc.
(P) The internal handling of magical variables has been cursed.
(P) This should have been caught by safemalloc() instead.
(S syntax) 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.
(W misc) You used the obsolescent dump()
built-in function, without fully
qualifying it as CORE::dump()
. Maybe it's a typo. See "dump" at perlfunc.
(S malloc) An internal routine called free() on something that had already been freed.
(S syntax) 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.
(F) \p
and \P
are used to introduce a named Unicode property, as
described in perlunicode and perlre. You used \p
or \P
in
a regular expression without specifying the property name.
(F) While under the use filetest
pragma, switching the real and
effective uids or gids failed.
(F) 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.
(F) Perl detected tainted data when trying to compile a regular
expression that contains the (?{ ... }) zero-width assertion, which
is unsafe. See "(?{ code })" at perlre, and perlsec.
(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(). See "(?{ code })" at perlre.
(F) A regular expression contained the (?{ ... }) zero-width
assertion, but that construct is only allowed when the use re 'eval'
pragma is in effect. See "(?{ code })" at perlre.
(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 put the filenames into a variable and glob that.
(F) The exec function is not implemented in MacPerl. See perlport.
(F) The final summary message when a Perl compilation fails.
(W exiting) You are exiting an eval by unconventional means, such as a goto, or a loop control statement.
(W exiting) You are exiting a format by unconventional means, such as a goto, or a loop control statement.
(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. See "sort" at perlfunc.
(W exiting) You are exiting a subroutine by unconventional means, such as a goto, or a loop control statement.
(W exiting) You are exiting a substitution by unconventional means, such as a return, a goto, or a loop control statement.
(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, e.g. bless($ref, $p || 'MyPackage');
(A) You've accidentally run your script through csh instead of Perl. Check the #! line, or manually feed your script into Perl yourself.
(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.
(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
"-", "\-". The <-- HERE shows in the regular expression about where the
problem was discovered. See perlre.
(P) 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.
(F) Your machine apparently doesn't implement fcntl(). What is this, a PDP-11 or something?
(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 ">>". See "open" at perlfunc.
(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 "<". See "open" at perlfunc. Another possibility is that you attempted to open filedescriptor 0 (also known as STDIN) for output (maybe you closed STDIN earlier?).
(W io) You opened for reading a filehandle that got the same filehandle id as STDOUT or STDERR. This occured because you closed STDOUT or STDERR previously.
(W io) You opened for writing a filehandle that got the same filehandle id as STDIN. This occured because you closed STDIN previously.
(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 put either the backslash or the name.
(W closed) The filehandle you're attempting to flock() got itself closed some time before now. Check your control flow. flock() operates on filehandles. Are you attempting to call flock() on a dirhandle by the same name?
(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.
(W redefine) You redefined a format. To suppress this warning, say
{ no warnings 'redefine'; eval "format NAME =..."; }
(W syntax) You said
if ($foo = 123)
when you meant
if ($foo == 123)
(or something like that).
(S syntax) 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) A warning from the GDBM_File extension that a store failed.
(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.
(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?
(S) A warning peculiar to VMS. The call to sys$getuai
underlying the
getpwnam operator returned an invalid UIC.
(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? See "getsockopt" at perlfunc.
(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 "::").
(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 coredump, 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.
(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 "less than".
(P) An error peculiar to OS/2. Most probably you're using an obsolete version of Perl, and this should not happen anyway.
(F) Unlike with "next" or "last", you're not allowed to goto an unspecified destination. See "goto" at perlfunc.
(F) A ()-group started with a count. A count is supposed to follow something: a template character or a ()-group. See "pack" at perlfunc.
(F) The final summary message when a perl -c
fails.
(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.
(D deprecated) Really old Perl let you omit the % on hash names in some spots. This is now heavily deprecated.
(F) The parser has given up trying to parse the program after 10 errors. Further error messages would likely be uninformative.
(W portable) The hexadecimal number you specified is larger than 2**32-1 (4294967295) and therefore non-portable between systems. See perlport for more on portability concerns.
(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.
(F) You used a digit other than 0 or 1 in a binary number.
(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.
(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.
(W syntax) An illegal character was found in a prototype declaration. Legal characters in prototypes are $, @, %, *, ;, [, ], &, and \.
(F) When using the sub keyword to construct an anonymous subroutine,
you must always specify a block of code. See perlsub.
(F) A subroutine was not declared correctly. See perlsub.
(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.
(W digit) You may have tried to use a character other than 0 - 9 or A - F, a - f in a hexadecimal number. Interpretation of the hexadecimal number stopped before the illegal character.
(F) You tried to divide a number by 0 to get the remainder. Most numbers don't take to this kindly.
(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).
(F) You used an 8 or 9 in an octal number.
(W digit) You may have tried to use an 8 or 9 in an octal number. Interpretation of the octal number stopped before the 8 or 9.
(X) The PERL5OPT environment variable may only be used to set the following switches: -[DIMUdmtw].
(W internal) 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.
(W internal) 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.
(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 "G_KEEPERR" at perlcall.
(F) An error peculiar to EBCDIC. Internally, v-strings are stored as Unicode code points, and encoded in EBCDIC as UTF-EBCDIC. The UTF-EBCDIC encoding is limited to code points no larger than 2147483647 (0x7FFFFFFF).
(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. See perlsec for more information.
(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. Also, the PATH must not contain any relative directory.
See perlsec.
(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}
, $ENV{BASH_ENV}
or $ENV{TERM}
are derived from data
supplied (or potentially supplied) by the user. The script must set
the path to a known value, using trustworthy data. See perlsec.
(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 a 32-bit architecture the largest hexadecimal, 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.
(P) Something went badly wrong in the regular expression parser. The <-- HERE shows in the regular expression about where the problem was discovered.
(S) 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" at perlvms). 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.
(P) Something went badly awry in the regular expression parser. The <-- HERE shows in the regular expression about where the problem was discovered.
(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. See "Terms and List Operators (Leftward)" at perlop.
The indicated attribute for a subroutine or variable was not recognized by Perl or by a user-supplied handler. See attributes.
The indicated attributes for a subroutine or variable were not recognized by Perl or by a user-supplied handler. See attributes.
(W printf) Perl does not understand the given format conversion. See "sprintf" at perlfunc.
(F) The range specified in a character class had a minimum character
greater than the maximum character. One possibility is that you forgot the
{}
from your ending \x{}
- \x
without the curly braces can go only
up to ff
. The <-- HERE shows in the regular expression about where the
problem was discovered. See perlre.
(F) The range specified in the tr/// or y/// operator had a minimum character greater than the maximum character. See perlop.
(F) Something other than a colon or whitespace was seen between the elements of an attribute list. If the previous attribute had a parenthesised parameter list, perhaps that list was terminated too soon. See attributes.
(W layer) When pushing layers onto the Perl I/O system, something other than a colon or whitespace was seen between the elements of a layer list. If the previous attribute had a parenthesised parameter list, perhaps that list was terminated too soon.
(F) The given character is not a valid pack or unpack type. See "pack" at perlfunc. (W) The given character is not a valid pack or unpack type but used to be silently ignored.
(F) Your machine apparently doesn't implement ioctl(), which is pretty strange for a machine that supports C.
(W unopened) You tried ioctl() on a filehandle that was never opened. Check you control flow and number of arguments.
(F) Your Perl has not been configured to have PerlIO, and therefore you cannot use IO layers. To have PerlIO Perl must be configured with 'useperlio'.
(F) Your machine doesn't implement the sockatmark() functionality, neither as a system call or an ioctl call (SIOCATMARK).
(W overload) The second (fourth, sixth, ...) argument of overload::constant needs to be a code reference. Either an anonymous subroutine, or a reference to a subroutine.
(W overload) You tried to overload a constant type the overload package is unaware of.
(P) The regular expression parser is confused.
(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. See "last" at perlfunc.
(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. See "last" at perlfunc.
(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. See "last" at perlfunc.
(F) While under the use filetest
pragma, switching the real and
effective uids or gids failed.
(F) While unpacking, the string buffer was alread used up when an unpack length/code combination tried to obtain more data. This results in an undefined value for the length. See "pack" at perlfunc.
(W closed) You tried to do a listen on a closed socket. Did you forget to check the return value of your socket() call? See "listen" at perlfunc.
(F) There is currently a limit on the length of string which lookbehind can handle. This restriction may be eased in a future release. The <-- HERE shows in the regular expression about where the problem was discovered.
(W io) You tried to do an lstat on a filehandle. What did you mean by that? lstat() makes sense only on filenames. (Perl did a fstat() instead on the filehandle.)
(F) Due to limitations in the current implementation, array and hash values cannot be returned in subroutines used in lvalue context. See "Lvalue subroutines" at perlsub.
(F) Between the brackets enclosing a numeric repeat count only digits are permitted. See "pack" at perlfunc.
(F) Between the brackets enclosing a numeric repeat count only digits are permitted. See "pack" at perlfunc.
(F) 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 builtin library search path, prefix2 is substituted. The error may
appear if components are not found, or are too long. See
"PERLLIB_PREFIX" in perlos2.
(F) You tried to use a function with a malformed prototype. The syntax of function prototypes is given a brief compile-time check for obvious errors like invalid characters. A more rigorous check is run when the function is called.
(W utf8) Perl detected something that didn't comply with UTF-8 encoding rules.
One possible cause is that you read in data that you thought to be in UTF-8 but it wasn't (it was for example legacy 8-bit data). Another possibility is careless use of utf8::upgrade().
Perl thought it was reading UTF-16 encoded character data but while doing it Perl met a malformed Unicode surrogate.
(W regexp) The pattern you've specified would be an infinite loop if the regular expression engine didn't specifically check for that. The <-- HERE shows in the regular expression about where the problem was discovered. See perlre.
(W) This warning may be due to running a perl5 script through a perl4 interpreter, especially if the word that is being warned about is "use" or "my".
(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. See "unpack" at perlfunc.
(F) An attempt was made to specify an entry in an overloading table that doesn't resolve to a valid subroutine. See overload.
See Server error.
(S) An advisory indicating that the previous error may have been caused by a missing delimiter on a string or pattern, because it eventually ended earlier on the current line.
(W syntax) An underscore (underbar) in a numeric constant did not separate two digits.
(F) The argument to the indicated command line switch must follow immediately after the switch, without intervening spaces.
(F) Wrong syntax of character name literal \N{charname}
within
double-quotish context.
(F) While certain functions allow you to specify a filehandle or an "indirect object" before the argument list, this ain't one of them.
(W pipe) You used the open(FH, "| command")
or
open(FH, "command |")
construction, but the command was missing or
blank.
(F) A double-quoted string ended with "\c", without the required control character name.
(F) The reserved syntax for lexically scoped subroutines requires that they have a name with which they can be found.
(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.
(S syntax) This is an educated guess made in conjunction with the message "%s found where operator expected". Often the missing operator is a comma.
(F) Missing right brace in \p{...}
or \P{...}
.
(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.
(S syntax) 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.
(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.
Yet another way is to assign to a foreach
loop VAR when VAR
is aliased to a constant in the look LIST:
$x = 1; foreach my $n ($x, 2) { $n *= 2; # modifies the $x, but fails on attempt to modify the 2 }
(F) You tried to make an array value spring into existence, and the subscript was probably negative, even counting from end of the array backwards.
(P) You tried to make a hash value spring into existence, and it couldn't be created for some peculiar reason.
(F) Only a bare module name is allowed as the first argument to a "use".
(F) The -M
or -m options say that Perl should load some module, but
you omitted the name of the module. Consult perlrun for full details
about -M
and -m.
(F) The open function has been asked to open multiple files. This
can happen if you are trying to open a pipe to a command that takes a
list of arguments, but have forgotten to specify a piped open mode.
See "open" at perlfunc for details.
(F) You don't have System V message IPC on your system.
(W syntax) Multidimensional arrays aren't written like $foo[1,2,3]
.
They're written like $foo[1][2][3]
, as in C.
(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*. See "pack" at perlfunc.
(F) You had an unpack template that contained a '/', but this did not follow some unpack specification producing a numeric value. See "pack" at perlfunc.
(F) Lexically scoped subroutines are not yet implemented. Don't try that yet.
(F) Lexically scoped variables aren't in a package, so it doesn't make sense to try to declare one with a package qualifier on the front. Use local() if you want to localize a package variable.
(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.
NOTE: This warning detects symbols that have been used only once so $c, @c, %c, *c, &c, sub c{}, c(), and c (the filehandle or format) are considered the same; if a program uses $c only once but also uses any of the others it will not trigger this warning.
(F) The length count obtained from a length/code unpack operation was negative. See "pack" at perlfunc.
(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.
(F) When vec is called in an lvalue context, the second argument must be
greater than or equal to zero.
(F) You can't quantify a quantifier without intervening parentheses. So things like ** or +* or ?* are illegal. The <-- HERE shows in the regular expression about where the problem was discovered.
Note that the minimal matching quantifiers, *?
, +?, and
??
appear to be nested quantifiers, but aren't. See perlre.
(S internal) The symbol in question was declared but somehow went out of scope before it could possibly have been used.
(W printf) There is a newline in a string to be left justified by
printf or sprintf.
The padding spaces will appear after the newline, which is probably not
what you wanted. Usually you should remove the newline from the string
and put formatting characters in the sprintf format.
(F) Certain operations are deemed to be too insecure for a setuid or setgid script to even be allowed to attempt. Generally speaking there will be another way to do what you want that is, if not secure, at least securable. See perlsec.
(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'd be just another one of the arguments.
One possible cause for this is that you expected to have imported a constant to your name space with use or import while no such importing took place, it may for example be that your operating system does not support that particular constant. Hopefully you did use an explicit import list for the constants you expect to see, please see "use" at perlfunc and "import" at perlfunc. While an explicit import list would probably have caught this error earlier it naturally does not remedy the fact that your operating system still does not support that constant. Maybe you have a typo in the constants of the symbol import list of use or import or in the constant name at the line where this error was triggered?
(F) 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.
(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.
(P) This is counted as an internal error, because every machine should supply dbm nowadays, because Perl comes with SDBM. See SDBM_File.
(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.
(F) A setuid script can't be specified by the user.
(F) An error peculiar to VMS. Perl handles its own command line redirection, and found a '2>' or a '2>>' on the command line, but can't find t