Shebang not recognized by perl

Question

I am getting the following error from a perl script:
[hostname:~] username% ./hello_world.pl
tcsh: print: Command not found.
tcsh: Missing name for redirect.
But if I issue the command explicitly indicating perl there is no problem:
[hostname:~] username% /usr/bin/perl ./hello_world.pl
Hello World!
Of course the script permissions are 755 and looks like this:
[hostname:~] username% more hello_world.pl
#!/usr/bin/perl
print "Hello World!\n";
Why am I seeing this very stange behaviour?
iMac G5 Mac OS X (10.4.8)

Answer 1

The default shell for Tiger is bash. How come you are using tcsh? Of course, tcsh should work just as well, but perhaps whatever you did to switch your shell had side effects.
Or, perhaps tcsh just doesn't work. I found the following cryptic comment: However, many shells (such as tcsh) don't support dual-shebang - in other words, you can't have a shebang path that points to an executable that also uses shebang. Since ePerl is written in Perl, it is a shebang script as well.
This site is talking about ePerl, not Perl, but I think it is the cause of your problem. I'm not enough of a shell-scripter to be able to explain it. Just try bash instead.