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 (enabled by default).
(S) A severe warning (enabled by 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.
E.g. "(W closed)" means a warning in the "closed"
category.
Optional warnings are enabled by using the "warnings" pragma or the
-w and
-W switches. Warnings may be captured by setting
$SIG{__WARN__} to a reference to a routine that will be called on each warning
instead of printing it. See perlvar.
Severe warnings are always enabled, unless they are explicitly disabled with the
"warnings" pragma or the
-X switch.
Trappable errors may be trapped using the eval operator. See "eval" in
perlfunc. In almost all cases, warnings may be selectively disabled or
promoted to fatal errors using the "warnings" pragma. See warnings.
The messages are in alphabetical order, without regard to upper or lower-case.
Some of these messages are generic. Spots that vary are denoted with a %s or
other printf-style escape. These escapes are ignored by the alphabetical
order, as are all characters other than letters. To look up your message, just
ignore anything that is not a letter.
- accept() on closed socket %s
- (W closed) You tried to do an accept on a closed socket. Did you forget to
check the return value of your socket() call? See
"accept" in perlfunc.
- Allocation too large: %x
- (X) You can't allocate more than 64K on an MS-DOS machine.
- '%c' allowed only after types %s in %s
- (F) The modifiers '!', '<' and '>' are allowed in pack() or
unpack() only after certain types. See "pack" in
perlfunc.
- Ambiguous call resolved as CORE::%s(), qualify as such or use &
- (W ambiguous) A subroutine you have declared has the same name as a Perl
keyword, and you have used the name without qualification for calling one
or the other. Perl decided to call the builtin because the subroutine is
not imported.
To force interpretation as a subroutine call, either put an ampersand before
the subroutine name, or qualify the name with its package. Alternatively,
you can import the subroutine (or pretend that it's imported with the
"use subs" pragma).
To silently interpret it as the Perl operator, use the "CORE::"
prefix on the operator (e.g. "CORE::log($x)") or declare the
subroutine to be an object method (see "Subroutine Attributes"
in perlsub or attributes).
- Ambiguous range in transliteration operator
- (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.)
- Ambiguous use of %s resolved as %s
- (S ambiguous) 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.
- Ambiguous use of -%s resolved as -&%s()
- (S ambiguous) You wrote something like "-foo", which might be
the string "-foo", or a call to the function "foo",
negated. If you meant the string, just write "-foo". If you
meant the function call, write "-foo()".
- Ambiguous use of %c resolved as operator %c
- (S ambiguous) "%", "&", and "*" are both
infix operators (modulus, bitwise and, and multiplication) and
initial special characters (denoting hashes, subroutines and typeglobs),
and you said something like "*foo * foo" that might be
interpreted as either of them. We assumed you meant the infix operator,
but please try to make it more clear -- in the example given, you might
write "*foo * foo()" if you really meant to multiply a glob by
the result of calling a function.
- Ambiguous use of %c{%s} resolved to %c%s
- (W ambiguous) You wrote something like "@{foo}", which might be
asking for the variable @foo, or it might be calling a function named foo,
and dereferencing it as an array reference. If you wanted the variable,
you can just write @foo. If you wanted to call the function, write
"@{foo()}" ... or you could just not have a variable and a
function with the same name, and save yourself a lot of trouble.
- Ambiguous use of %c{%s[...]} resolved to %c%s[...]
- Ambiguous use of %c{%s{...}} resolved to %c%s{...}
- (W ambiguous) You wrote something like "${foo[2]}" (where foo
represents the name of a Perl keyword), which might be looking for element
number 2 of the array named @foo, in which case please write $foo[2], or
you might have meant to pass an anonymous arrayref to the function named
foo, and then do a scalar deref on the value it returns. If you meant
that, write "${foo([2])}".
In regular expressions, the "${foo[2]}" syntax is sometimes
necessary to disambiguate between array subscripts and character classes.
"/$length[2345]/", for instance, will be interpreted as $length
followed by the character class "[2345]". If an array subscript
is what you want, you can avoid the warning by changing
"/${length[2345]}/" to the unsightly
"/${\$length[2345]}/", by renaming your array to something that
does not coincide with a built-in keyword, or by simply turning off
warnings with "no warnings 'ambiguous';".
- '|' and '<' may not both be specified on command line
- (F) An error peculiar to VMS. Perl does its own command line redirection,
and found that STDIN was a pipe, and that you also tried to redirect STDIN
using '<'. Only one STDIN stream to a customer, please.
- '|' and '>' may not both be specified on command line
- (F) An error peculiar to VMS. Perl does its own command line redirection,
and thinks you tried to redirect stdout both to a file and into a pipe to
another command. You need to choose one or the other, though nothing's
stopping you from piping into a program or Perl script which 'splits'
output into two streams, such as
open(OUT,">$ARGV[0]") or die "Can't write to $ARGV[0]: $!";
while (<STDIN>) {
print;
print OUT;
}
close OUT;
- 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. See "grep" in perlfunc and
"map" in perlfunc for alternatives.
- Arg too short for msgsnd
- (F) msgsnd() requires a string at least as long as
sizeof(long).
- Argument "%s" isn't numeric%s
- (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.
- Argument list not closed for PerlIO layer "%s"
- (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.
- Array @%s missing the @ in argument %d of %s()
- (D deprecated) Really old Perl let you omit the @ on array names in some
spots. This is now heavily deprecated.
- A sequence of multiple spaces in a charnames alias definition is
deprecated
- (D deprecated) You defined a character name which had multiple space
characters in a row. Change them to single spaces. Usually these names are
defined in the ":alias" import argument to "use
charnames", but they could be defined by a translator installed into
$^H{charnames}. See "CUSTOM ALIASES" in charnames.
- assertion botched: %s
- (X) The malloc package that comes with Perl had an internal failure.
- Assertion %s failed: file "%s", line %d
- (X) A general assertion failed. The file in question must be
examined.
- Assigning non-zero to $[ is no longer possible
- (F) When the "array_base" feature is disabled (e.g., under
"use v5.16;") the special variable $[, which is deprecated, is
now a fixed zero value.
- Assignment to both a list and a scalar
- (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.
- Attempt to access disallowed key '%s' in a restricted hash
- (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.
- Attempt to bless into a freed package
- (F) You wrote "bless $foo" with one argument after somehow
causing the current package to be freed. Perl cannot figure out what to
do, so it throws up in hands in despair.
- Attempt to bless into a reference
- (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";
- Attempt to clear deleted array
- (S debugging) An array was assigned to when it was being freed. Freed
values are not supposed to be visible to Perl code. This can also happen
if XS code calls "av_clear" from a custom magic callback on the
array.
- Attempt to delete disallowed key '%s' from a restricted hash
- (F) The failing code attempted to delete from a restricted hash a key
which is not in its key set.
- Attempt to delete readonly key '%s' from a restricted hash
- (F) The failing code attempted to delete a key whose value has been
declared readonly from a restricted hash.
- Attempt to free non-arena SV: 0x%x
- (S 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 '%s'%s
- (S 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.
- Attempt to free temp prematurely: SV 0x%x
- (S 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.
- Attempt to free unreferenced glob pointers
- (S internal) The reference counts got screwed up on symbol aliases.
- Attempt to free unreferenced scalar: SV 0x%x
- (S 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 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" 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.
- Attempt to reload %s aborted.
- (F) You tried to load a file with "use" or "require"
that failed to compile once already. Perl will not try to compile this
file again unless you delete its entry from %INC. See "require"
in perlfunc and "%INC" in perlvar.
- Attempt to set length of freed array
- (W misc) You tried to set the length of an array which has been freed. You
can do this by storing a reference to the scalar representing the last
index of an array and later assigning through that reference. For example
$r = do {my @a; \$#a};
$$r = 503
- 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. See "substr" in perlfunc.
- Attribute "locked" is deprecated
- (D deprecated) You have used the attributes pragma to modify the
"locked" attribute on a code reference. The :locked attribute is
obsolete, has had no effect since 5005 threads were removed, and will be
removed in a future release of Perl 5.
- Attribute prototype(%s) discards earlier prototype attribute in same
sub
- (W misc) A sub was declared as sub foo : prototype(A) : prototype(B) {},
for example. Since each sub can only have one prototype, the earlier
declaration(s) are discarded while the last one is applied.
- Attribute "unique" is deprecated
- (D deprecated) You have used the attributes pragma to modify the
"unique" attribute on an array, hash or scalar reference. The
:unique attribute has had no effect since Perl 5.8.8, and will be removed
in a future release of Perl 5.
- av_reify called on tied array
- (S debugging) This indicates that something went wrong and Perl got
very confused about @_ or @DB::args being tied.
- Bad arg length for %s, is %u, 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 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 '}'.
- 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 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().
- Bad hash
- (P) One of the internal hash routines was passed a null HV pointer.
- 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.
- 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 plugin affecting keyword '%s'
- (F) An extension using the keyword plugin mechanism violated the plugin
API.
- 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 the 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 dirhandle
- (P) An internal request asked to add a dirhandle 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.
- Bad symbol for scalar
- (P) An internal request asked to add a scalar entry to something that
wasn't a symbol table entry.
- 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.
- 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?
- 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.
- \%d better written as $%d
- (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.
- Binary number > 0b11111111111111111111111111111111 non-portable
- (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.
- 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? See "bind"
in perlfunc.
- binmode() on closed filehandle %s
- (W unopened) You tried binmode() on a filehandle that was never
opened. Check your control flow and number of arguments.
- "\b{" is deprecated; use "\b\{" or "\b[{]"
instead in regex; marked by <-- HERE in m/%s/
- "\B{" is deprecated; use "\B\{" or "\B[{]"
instead in regex; marked by <-- HERE in m/%s/
- (D deprecated) Use of an unescaped "{" immediately following a
"\b" or "\B" is now deprecated so as to reserve its
use for Perl itself in a future release. You can either precede the brace
with a backslash, or enclose it in square brackets; the latter is the way
to go if the pattern delimiters are "{}".
- Bit vector size > 32 non-portable
- (W portable) Using bit vector sizes larger than 32 is non-portable.
- Bizarre copy of %s
- (P) Perl detected an attempt to copy an internal value that is not
copiable.
- Bizarre SvTYPE [%d]
- (P) When starting a new thread or returning values from a thread, Perl
encountered an invalid data type.
- 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.
- %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.
See perlsub.
- Calling POSIX::%s() is deprecated
- (D deprecated) You called a function whose use is deprecated. See the
function's name in POSIX for details.
- Cannot compress integer in pack
- (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" in perlfunc.
- Cannot compress negative numbers in pack
- (F) An argument to pack("w",...) was negative. The BER
compressed integer format can only be used with positive integers. See
"pack" in perlfunc.
- Cannot convert a reference to %s to typeglob
- (F) You manipulated Perl's symbol table directly, stored a reference in
it, then tried to access that symbol via conventional Perl syntax. The
access triggers Perl to autovivify that typeglob, but it there is no legal
conversion from that type of reference to a typeglob.
- Cannot copy to %s
- (P) Perl detected an attempt to copy a value to an internal type that
cannot be directly assigned to.
- Cannot find encoding "%s"
- (S io) You tried to apply an encoding that did not exist to a filehandle,
either with open() or binmode().
- Cannot set tied @DB::args
- (F) "caller" tried to set @DB::args, but found it tied. Tying
@DB::args is not supported. (Before this error was added, it used to
crash.)
- Cannot tie unreifiable array
- (P) You somehow managed to call "tie" on an array that does not
keep a reference count on its arguments and cannot be made to do so. Such
arrays are not even supposed to be accessible to Perl code, but are only
used internally.
- Can only compress unsigned integers in pack
- (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" in
perlfunc.
- Can't bless non-reference value
- (F) Only hard references may be blessed. This is how Perl
"enforces" encapsulation of objects. See perlobj.
- Can't "break" in a loop topicalizer
- (F) You called "break", but you're in a "foreach"
block rather than a "given" block. You probably meant to use
"next" or "last".
- Can't "break" outside a given block
- (F) You called "break", but you're not inside a
"given" block.
- 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 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. See perlobj.
- 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 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);
- Can't call mro_isa_changed_in() on anonymous symbol table
- (P) Perl got confused as to whether a hash was a plain hash or a symbol
table hash when trying to update @ISA caches.
- Can't call mro_method_changed_in() on anonymous symbol table
- (F) An XS module tried to call "mro_method_changed_in" on a hash
that was not attached to the symbol table.
- 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 %s in %s
- (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.
- Can't "continue" outside a when block
- (F) You called "continue", but you're not inside a
"when" or "default" block.
- Can't create pipe mailbox
- (P) An error peculiar to VMS. The process is suffering from exhausted
quotas or other plumbing problems.
- Can't declare %s in "%s"
- (F) Only scalar, array, and hash variables may be declared as
"my", "our" or "state" variables. They must
have ordinary identifiers as names.
- Can't "default" outside a topicalizer
- (F) You have used a "default" block that is neither inside a
"foreach" loop nor a "given" block. (Note that this
error is issued on exit from the "default" block, so you won't
get the error if you use an explicit "continue".)
- 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, a FIFO or an uneditable directory. The file was
ignored.
- 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 waitpid with flags
- (F) This machine doesn't have either waitpid() or wait4(),
so only waitpid() without flags is emulated.
- Can't emulate -%s on #! line
- (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.
- Can't %s %s-endian %ss on this platform
- (F) Your platform's byte-order is neither big-endian nor little-endian, or
it has a very strange pointer size. Packing and unpacking big- or
little-endian floating point values and pointers may not be possible. See
"pack" in perlfunc.
- 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. 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 an opnumber for "%s"
- (F) A string of a form "CORE::word" was given to
prototype(), but there is no builtin with the name
"word".
- Can't find %s character property "%s"
- (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? See "Properties accessible through \p{} and \P{}"
in perluniprops for a complete list of available official properties.
- 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. See "goto" in perlfunc.
- 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 %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 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 or there may not be a
linebreak after it. A good programmer's editor will have a way to help you
find these characters (or lack of characters). See perlop for the full
details on here-documents.
- Can't find Unicode property definition "%s"
- (F) You may have tried to use "\p" which means a Unicode
property (for example "\p{Lu}" matches all uppercase letters).
If you did mean to use a Unicode property, see "Properties accessible
through \p{} and \P{}" in perluniprops for a complete list of
available 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, or until
"\E").
- Can't fork: %s
- (F) A fatal error occurred while trying to fork while opening a
pipeline.
- Can't fork, trying again in 5 seconds
- (W pipe) A fork in a piped open failed with EAGAIN and will be retried
after five seconds.
- Can't get filespec - stale stat buffer?
- (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.)
- Can't get pipe mailbox device name
- (P) An error 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) An error peculiar to VMS. Perl asked $GETSYI how big you want your
mailbox buffers to be, and didn't get an answer.
- 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. See "goto" in
perlfunc.
- 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. See "goto" in perlfunc.
- Can't goto subroutine from an eval-%s
- (F) The "goto subroutine" call can't be used to jump out of an
eval "string" or block.
- Can't goto subroutine from a sort sub (or similar callback)
- (F) The "goto subroutine" call can't be used to jump out of the
comparison sub for a sort(), or from a similar callback (such as
the reduce() function in List::Util).
- 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. See "goto" in perlfunc.
- 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 kill a non-numeric process ID
- (F) Process identifiers must be (signed) integers. It is a fatal error to
attempt to kill() an undefined, empty-string or otherwise
non-numeric process identifier.
- 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, 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" in perlfunc.
- Can't linearize anonymous symbol table
- (F) Perl tried to calculate the method resolution order (MRO) of a
package, but failed because the package stash has no name.
- Can't load '%s' for module %s
- (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.
- Can't localize lexical variable %s
- (F) You used local on a variable name that was previously declared as a
lexical variable using "my" or "state". 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 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 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 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" in perlfunc and lib.
- Can't locate auto/%s.al in @INC
- (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".
- Can't locate loadable object for module %s in @INC
- (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.
- 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. See perlobj.
- Can't locate object method "%s" via package "%s"
(perhaps you forgot to load "%s"?)
- (F) You called a method on a class that did not exist, and the method
could not be found in UNIVERSAL. This often means that a method requires a
package that has not been loaded.
- 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 locate PerlIO%s
- (F) You tried to use in open() a PerlIO layer that does not exist,
e.g. open(FH, ">:nosuchlayer", "somefile").
- 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 make loaded symbols global on this platform while loading %s
- (S) A module passed the flag 0x01 to DynaLoader::dl_load_file() to
request that symbols from the stated file are made available globally
within the process, but that functionality is not available on this
platform. Whilst the module likely will still work, this may prevent the
perl interpreter from loading other XS-based extensions which need to link
directly to functions defined in the C or XS code in the stated file.
- 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 auto-increment.
- Can't modify nonexistent substring
- (P) The internal routine that does assignment to a substr() was
handed a NULL.
- Can't modify non-lvalue subroutine call
- (F) Subroutines meant to be used in lvalue context should be declared as
such. See "Lvalue subroutines" in perlsub.
- 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 "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, 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" in perlfunc.
- Can't open %s
- (F) You tried to run a perl built with MAD support with the PERL_XMLDUMP
environment variable set, but the file named by that variable could not be
opened.
- 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.
(F) You tried to call perl with the -e switch, but /dev/null
(or your operating system's equivalent) could not be opened.
- Can't open a reference
- (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.
- 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. Alternately, direct the pipe's output to a
file using ">", and then read it in under a different file
handle.
- Can't open error file %s as stderr
- (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.
- Can't open input file %s as stdin
- (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.
- Can't open output file %s as stdout
- (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.
- Can't open output pipe (name: %s)
- (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.
- Can't open perl script "%s": %s
- (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`".
- Can't read CRTL environ
- (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.
- 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, 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" in perlfunc.
- 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 reset %ENV on this system
- (F) You called "reset('E')" or similar, which tried to reset all
variables in the current package beginning with "E". In the main
package, that includes %ENV. Resetting %ENV is not supported on some
systems, notably VMS.
- Can't resolve method "%s" overloading "%s" in package
"%s"
- (F)(P) Error 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.
- 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 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. See perlsub.
- Can't return %s to lvalue scalar context
- (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.
- 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 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 upgrade %s (%d) to %d
- (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 use '%c' after -mname
- (F) You tried to call perl with the -m switch, but you put
something other than "=" after the module name.
- Can't use anonymous symbol table for method lookup
- (F) 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::".
- 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 bareword ("%s") as %s ref while "strict
refs" in use
- (F) Only hard references are allowed by "strict refs". Symbolic
references are disallowed. See perlref.
- Can't use %! because Errno.pm is not available
- (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.
- Can't use both '<' and '>' after type '%c' in %s
- (F) A type cannot be forced to have both big-endian and little-endian
byte-order at the same time, so this combination of modifiers is not
allowed. See "pack" in perlfunc.
- 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 global %s in "%s"
- (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 '%c' in a group with different byte-order in %s
- (F) You attempted to force a different byte-order on a type that is
already inside a group with a byte-order modifier. For example you cannot
force little-endianness on a type that is inside a big-endian group.
- Can't use "my %s" in sort comparison
- (F) The global variables $a and $b are reserved for sort comparisons. You
mentioned $a or $b in the same line as the <=> or cmp operator, and
the variable had earlier been declared as a lexical variable. Either
qualify the sort variable with the package name, or rename the lexical
variable.
- Can't use %s ref as %s ref
- (F) You've mixed up your reference types. You have to dereference a
reference of the type needed. You can use the ref() function to
test the type of the reference, if need be.
- Can't use string ("%s") as %s ref while "strict refs"
in use
- Can't use string ("%s"...) as %s ref while "strict
refs" in use
- (F) You've told Perl to dereference a string, something which "use
strict" blocks to prevent it happening accidentally. See
"Symbolic references" in perlref. This can be triggered by an
"@" or "$" in a double-quoted string immediately
before interpolating a variable, for example in "user
@$twitter_id", which says to treat the contents of $twitter_id as an
array reference; use a "\" to have a literal "@"
symbol followed by the contents of $twitter_id: "user
\@$twitter_id".
- 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 a
hash or array reference, or anything else subscriptable.
- 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 weaken a nonreference
- (F) You attempted to weaken something that was not a reference. Only
references can be weakened.
- Can't "when" outside a topicalizer
- (F) You have used a when() block that is neither inside a
"foreach" loop nor a "given" block. (Note that this
error is issued on exit from the "when" block, so you won't get
the error if the match fails, or if you use an explicit
"continue".)
- 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, and repeat that.
- Character following "\c" must be printable ASCII
- (F)(D deprecated, syntax) In "\cX", X must be a
printable (non-control) ASCII character. This is fatal starting in v5.20
for non-ASCII characters, and it is planned to make this fatal in all
instances in Perl v5.22. In the cases where it isn't fatal, the character
this evaluates to is derived by exclusive or'ing the code point of this
character with 0x40.
Note that ASCII characters that don't map to control characters are
discouraged here as well, and will generate the warning (when enabled)
""\c%c" is more clearly written simply as
"%s"".
- Character in 'C' format wrapped in pack
- (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.
- Character in 'c' format wrapped in pack
- (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.
- Character in '%c' format wrapped in unpack
- (W unpack) You tried something like
unpack("H", "\x{2a1}")
where the format expects to process a byte (a character with a value below
256), but a higher value was provided instead. Perl uses the value modulus
256 instead, as if you had provided:
unpack("H", "\x{a1}")
- Character in 'W' format wrapped in pack
- (W pack) You said
pack("U0W", $x)
where $x is either less than 0 or more than 255. However,
"U0"-mode expects all values to fall in the interval [0, 255],
so Perl behaved as if you meant:
pack("U0W", $x & 255)
- Character(s) in '%c' format wrapped in pack
- (W pack) You tried something like
pack("u", "\x{1f3}b")
where the format expects to process a sequence of bytes (character with a
value below 256), but some of the characters had a higher value. Perl uses
the character values modulus 256 instead, as if you had provided:
pack("u", "\x{f3}b")
- Character(s) in '%c' format wrapped in unpack
- (W unpack) You tried something like
unpack("s", "\x{1f3}b")
where the format expects to process a sequence of bytes (character with a
value below 256), but some of the characters had a higher value. Perl uses
the character values modulus 256 instead, as if you had provided:
unpack("s", "\x{f3}b")
- "\c%c" is more clearly written simply as "%s"
- (W syntax) The "\cX" construct is intended to be a way to
specify non-printable characters. You used it for a printable one, which
is better written as simply itself, perhaps preceded by a backslash for
non-word characters. Doing it the way you did is not portable between
ASCII and EBCDIC platforms.
- Cloning substitution context is unimplemented
- (F) Creating a new thread inside the "s///" operator is not
supported.
- closedir() attempted on invalid dirhandle %s
- (W io) The dirhandle you tried to close is either closed or not really a
dirhandle. Check your control flow.
- close() on unopened filehandle %s
- (W unopened) You tried to close a filehandle that was never opened.
- Closure prototype called
- (F) If a closure has attributes, the subroutine passed to an attribute
handler is the prototype that is cloned when a new closure is created.
This subroutine cannot be called.
- Code missing after '/'
- (F) You had a (sub-)template that ends with a '/'. There must be another
template code following the slash. See "pack" in perlfunc.
- Code point 0x%X is not Unicode, may not be portable
- (S non_unicode) You had a code point above the Unicode maximum of
U+10FFFF.
Perl allows strings to contain a superset of Unicode code points, up to the
limit of what is storable in an unsigned integer on your system, but these
may not be accepted by other languages/systems. At one time, it was legal
in some standards to have code points up to 0x7FFF_FFFF, but not higher.
Code points above 0xFFFF_FFFF require larger than a 32 bit word.
- %s: Command not found
- (A) You've accidentally run your script through csh or another
shell instead of Perl. Check the #! line, or manually feed your script
into Perl yourself. The #! line at the top of your file could look like
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
- 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 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.)
- 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? See
"connect" in perlfunc.
- Constant(%s): Call to &{$^H{%s}} did not return a defined value
- (F) The subroutine registered to handle constant overloading (see
overload) or a custom charnames handler (see "CUSTOM
TRANSLATORS" in charnames) returned an undefined value.
- Constant(%s): $^H{%s} is not defined
- (F) The parser found inconsistencies while attempting to define an
overloaded constant. Perhaps you forgot to load the corresponding overload
pragma?
- 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.
See "Constant Functions" in perlsub and constant.
- Constant subroutine %s redefined
- (W redefine)(S) You redefined a subroutine which had previously been
eligible for inlining. See "Constant Functions" in perlsub for
commentary and workarounds.
- Constant subroutine %s undefined
- (W misc) You undefined a subroutine which had previously been eligible for
inlining. See "Constant Functions" in perlsub for commentary and
workarounds.
- Constant(%s) unknown
- (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 pragma?.
- Copy method did not return a reference
- (F) The method which overloads "=" is buggy. See "Copy
Constructor" in overload.
- &CORE::%s cannot be called directly
- (F) You tried to call a subroutine in the "CORE::" namespace
with &foo syntax or through a reference. Some subroutines in this
package cannot yet be called that way, but must be called as barewords.
Something like this will work:
BEGIN { *shove = \&CORE::push; }
shove @array, 1,2,3; # pushes on to @array
- CORE::%s is not a keyword
- (F) The CORE:: namespace is reserved for Perl keywords.
- Corrupted regexp opcode %d > %d
- (P) This is either an error in Perl, or, if you're using one, your custom
regular expression engine. If not the latter, report the problem through
the perlbug utility.
- 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.
- Corrupt malloc ptr 0x%x at 0x%x
- (P) The malloc package that comes with Perl had an internal failure.
- Count after length/code in unpack
- (F) You had an unpack template indicating a counted-length string, but you
have also specified an explicit size for the string. See "pack"
in perlfunc.
- Deep recursion on anonymous subroutine
- 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.
This threshold can be changed from 100, by recompiling the perl
binary, setting the C pre-processor macro "PERL_SUB_DEPTH_WARN"
to the desired value.
- 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 }" for
example.
- defined(%hash) is deprecated
- (D deprecated) "defined()" is not usually right on hashes and
has been discouraged since 5.004.
Although "defined %hash" is false on a plain not-yet-used hash, it
becomes true in several non-obvious circumstances, including iterators,
weak references, stash names, even remaining true after "undef
%hash". These things make "defined %hash" fairly useless in
practice.
If a check for non-empty is what you wanted then just put it in boolean
context (see "Scalar values" in perldata):
if (%hash) {
# not empty
}
If you had "defined %Foo::Bar::QUUX" to check whether such a
package variable exists then that's never really been reliable, and isn't
a good way to enquire about the features of a package, or whether it's
loaded, etc.
- (?(DEFINE)....) does not allow branches in regex; marked by
<-- HERE in m/%s/
- (F) You used something like "(?(DEFINE)...|..)" which is
illegal. The most likely cause of this error is that you left out a
parenthesis inside of the "...." part.
The <-- HERE shows whereabouts in the regular expression the problem was
discovered.
- %s defines neither package nor VERSION--version check failed
- (F) You said something like "use Module 42" but in the Module
file there are neither package declarations nor a $VERSION.
- delete argument is index/value array slice, use array slice
- (F) You used index/value array slice syntax (%array[...]) as the argument
to "delete". You probably meant @array[...] with an @ symbol
instead.
- delete argument is key/value hash slice, use hash slice
- (F) You used key/value hash slice syntax (%hash{...}) as the argument to
"delete". You probably meant @hash{...} with an @ symbol
instead.
- delete 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"}
- 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.
- Deprecated use of my() in false conditional
- (D deprecated) You used a declaration similar to "my $x if 0".
There has been a long-standing bug in Perl that causes a lexical variable
not to be cleared at scope exit when its declaration includes a false
conditional. Some people have exploited this bug to achieve a kind of
static variable. Since we intend to fix this bug, we don't want people
relying on this behavior. You can achieve a similar static effect by
declaring the variable in a separate block outside the function, eg
sub f { my $x if 0; return $x++ }
becomes
{ my $x; sub f { return $x++ } }
Beginning with perl 5.10.0, you can also use "state" variables to
have lexicals that are initialized only once (see feature):
sub f { state $x; return $x++ }
- DESTROY created new reference to dead object '%s'
- (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.
- Did not produce a valid header
- See Server error.
- %s did not return a true value
- (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" in perlfunc.
- (Did you mean &%s instead?)
- (W misc) 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 $@ was empty.
- Document contains no data
- See Server error.
- %s does not define %s::VERSION--version check failed
- (F) You said something like "use Module 42" but the Module did
not define a $VERSION.
- '/' does not take a repeat count
- (F) You cannot put a repeat count of any kind right after the '/' code.
See "pack" in perlfunc.
- Don't know how to get file name
- (P) "PerlIO_getname", a perl internal I/O function specific to
VMS, was somehow called on another platform. This should not happen.
- Don't know how to handle magic of type \%o
- (P) The internal handling of magical variables has been cursed.
- do_study: out of memory
- (P) This should have been caught by safemalloc() instead.
- (Do you need to predeclare %s?)
- (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.
- dump() better written as CORE::dump()
- (W misc) You used the obsolescent "dump()" built-in function,
without fully qualifying it as "CORE::dump()". Maybe it's a
typo. See "dump" in perlfunc.
- dump is not supported
- (F) Your machine doesn't support dump/undump.
- Duplicate free() ignored
- (S malloc) An internal routine called free() on something that had
already been freed.
- Duplicate modifier '%c' after '%c' in %s
- (W unpack) You have applied the same modifier more than once after a type
in a pack template. See "pack" in perlfunc.
- each on reference is experimental
- (S experimental::autoderef) "each" with a scalar argument is
experimental and may change or be removed in a future Perl version. If you
want to take the risk of using this feature, simply disable this warning:
no warnings "experimental::autoderef";
- elseif should be elsif
- (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.
- Empty \%c{} in regex; marked by <-- HERE in m/%s/
- (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.
- entering effective %s failed
- (F) While under the "use filetest" pragma, switching the real
and effective uids or gids failed.
- %ENV is aliased to %s
- (F) You're running under taint mode, and the %ENV variable has been
aliased to another hash, so it doesn't reflect anymore the state of the
program's environment. This is potentially insecure.
- Error converting file specification %s
- (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.
- Escape literal pattern white space under /x
- (D deprecated) You compiled a regular expression pattern with
"/x" to ignore white space, and you used, as a literal, one of
the characters that Perl plans to eventually treat as white space. The
character must be escaped somehow, or it will work differently on a future
Perl that does treat it as white space. The easiest way is to insert a
backslash immediately before it, or to enclose it with square brackets.
This change is to bring Perl into conformance with Unicode
recommendations. Here are the five characters that generate this warning:
U+0085 NEXT LINE, U+200E LEFT-TO-RIGHT MARK, U+200F RIGHT-TO-LEFT MARK,
U+2028 LINE SEPARATOR, and U+2029 PARAGRAPH SEPARATOR.
- 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. See "(?{ code })" in perlre, and perlsec.
- Eval-group not allowed at runtime, use re 'eval' in regex m/%s/
- (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 using the "re
'eval'" pragma or by explicitly building the pattern from an
interpolated string at run time and using that in an eval(). See
"(?{ code })" in perlre.
- Eval-group not allowed, use re 'eval' in regex m/%s/
- (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 })" in
perlre.
- EVAL without pos change exceeded limit in regex; marked by
<-- HERE in m/%s/
- (F) You used a pattern that nested too many EVAL calls without consuming
any text. Restructure the pattern so that text is consumed.
The <-- HERE shows whereabouts in the regular expression the problem was
discovered.
- 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 put the filenames into a variable
and glob that.
- exec? I'm not *that* kind of operating system
- (F) The "exec" function is not implemented on some systems,
e.g., Symbian OS. See perlport.
- Execution of %s aborted due to compilation errors.
- (F) The final summary message when a Perl compilation fails.
- exists argument is not a HASH or ARRAY element or a subroutine
- (F) The argument to "exists" must be a hash or array element or
a subroutine with an ampersand, such as:
$foo{$bar}
$ref->{"susie"}[12]
&do_something
- exists argument is not a subroutine name
- (F) The argument to "exists" for "exists &sub"
must be a subroutine name, and not a subroutine call. "exists
&sub()" will generate this error.
- Exiting eval via %s
- (W exiting) You are exiting an eval by unconventional means, such as a
goto, or a loop control statement.
- Exiting format via %s
- (W exiting) You are exiting a format by unconventional means, such as a
goto, or a loop control statement.
- Exiting pseudo-block via %s
- (W exiting) You are exiting a rather special block construct (like a sort
block or subroutine) by unconventional means, such as a goto, or a loop
control statement. See "sort" in perlfunc.
- Exiting subroutine via %s
- (W exiting) You are exiting a subroutine by unconventional means, such as
a goto, or a loop control statement.
- Exiting substitution via %s
- (W exiting) You are exiting a substitution by unconventional means, such
as a return, a goto, or a loop control statement.
- Expecting close bracket in regex; marked by <-- HERE in
m/%s/
- (F) You wrote something like
(?13
to denote a capturing group of the form "(? PARNO)", but
omitted the ")".
- Expecting '(?flags:(?[...' in regex; marked by <-- HERE in
m/%s/
- (F) The "(?[...])" extended character class regular expression
construct only allows character classes (including character class escapes
like "\d"), operators, and parentheses. The one exception is
"(?flags:...)" containing at least one flag and exactly one
"(?[...])" construct. This allows a regular expression
containing just "(?[...])" to be interpolated. If you see this
error message, then you probably have some other "(?...)"
construct inside your character class. See "Extended Bracketed
Character Classes" in perlrecharclass.
- Experimental subroutine signatures not enabled
- (F) To use subroutine signatures, you must first enable them:
no warnings "experimental::signatures";
use feature "signatures";
sub foo ($left, $right) { ... }
- Experimental "%s" subs not enabled
- (F) To use lexical subs, you must first enable them:
no warnings 'experimental::lexical_subs';
use feature 'lexical_subs';
my sub foo { ... }
- Explicit blessing to '' (assuming package main)
- (W misc) You are blessing a reference to a zero length string. This has
the effect of blessing the reference into the package main. This is
usually not what you want. Consider providing a default target package,
e.g. bless($ref, $p || 'MyPackage');
- %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.
- %s failed--call queue aborted
- (F) An untrapped exception was raised while executing a UNITCHECK, CHECK,
INIT, or END subroutine. Processing of the remainder of the queue of such
routines has been prematurely ended.
- False [] range "%s" in regex; marked by <-- HERE in
m/%s/
- (W regexp)(F) 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 "-". In a "(?[...])"
construct, this is an error, rather than a warning. Consider quoting the
"-", "\-". The <-- HERE shows whereabouts in
the regular expression the problem was discovered. See perlre.
- Fatal VMS error (status=%d) at %s, line %d
- (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.
- fcntl is not implemented
- (F) Your machine apparently doesn't implement fcntl(). What is
this, a PDP-11 or something?
- FETCHSIZE returned a negative value
- (F) A tied array claimed to have a negative number of elements, which is
not possible.
- Field too wide in 'u' format in pack
- (W pack) Each line in an uuencoded string starts with a length indicator
which can't encode values above 63. So there is no point in asking for a
line length bigger than that. Perl will behave as if you specified
"u63" as the format.
- 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 ">>". See "open" in
perlfunc.
- 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 ">". If you intended only to read from the file, use
"<". See "open" in perlfunc. Another possibility is
that you attempted to open filedescriptor 0 (also known as STDIN) for
output (maybe you closed STDIN earlier?).
- Filehandle %s reopened as %s only for input
- (W io) You opened for reading a filehandle that got the same filehandle id
as STDOUT or STDERR. This occurred because you closed STDOUT or STDERR
previously.
- Filehandle STDIN reopened as %s only for output
- (W io) You opened for writing a filehandle that got the same filehandle id
as STDIN. This occurred because you closed STDIN previously.
- 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 put 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 control flow. flock()
operates on filehandles. Are you attempting to call flock() on a
dirhandle by the same 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.
- Format %s redefined
- (W redefine) You redefined a format. To suppress this warning, say
{
no warnings 'redefine';
eval "format NAME =...";
}
- Found = in conditional, should be ==
- (W syntax) You said
if ($foo = 123)
when you meant
if ($foo == 123)
(or something like that).
- %s found where operator expected
- (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.
- 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%sname() 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? See
"getsockopt" in perlfunc.
- given is experimental
- (S experimental::smartmatch) "given" depends on smartmatch,
which is experimental, so its behavior may change or even be removed in
any future release of perl. See the explanation under "Experimental
Details on given and when" in perlsyn.
- Global symbol "%s" requires explicit package name
- (F) You've said "use strict" or "use strict vars",
which indicates that all variables must either be lexically scoped (using
"my" or "state"), declared beforehand using
"our", or explicitly qualified to say which package the global
variable is in (using "::").
- glob failed (%s)
- (S 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.
- 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 "less than".
- gmtime(%f) failed
- (W overflow) You called "gmtime" with a number that it could not
handle: too large, too small, or NaN. The returned value is
"undef".
- gmtime(%f) too large
- (W overflow) You called "gmtime" with a number that was larger
than it can reliably handle and "gmtime" probably returned the
wrong date. This warning is also triggered with NaN (the special
not-a-number value).
- gmtime(%f) too small
- (W overflow) You called "gmtime" with a number that was smaller
than it can reliably handle and "gmtime" probably returned the
wrong date.
- Got an error from DosAllocMem
- (P) An error peculiar to OS/2. Most probably you're using an obsolete
version of Perl, and this should not happen anyway.
- goto must have label
- (F) Unlike with "next" or "last", you're not allowed
to goto an unspecified destination. See "goto" in perlfunc.
- Goto undefined subroutine%s
- (F) You tried to call a subroutine with "goto &sub" syntax,
but the indicated subroutine hasn't been defined, or if it was, it has
since been undefined.
- Group name must start with a non-digit word character in regex; marked by
<-- HERE in m/%s/
- (F) Group names must follow the rules for perl identifiers, meaning they
must start with a non-digit word character. A common cause of this error
is using (?&0) instead of (?0). See perlre.
- ()-group starts with a count
- (F) A ()-group started with a count. A count is supposed to follow
something: a template character or a ()-group. See "pack" in
perlfunc.
- %s had compilation errors.
- (F) The final summary message when a "perl -c" fails.
- 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.
- %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.
- Hexadecimal number > 0xffffffff non-portable
- (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.
- 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.
- Ignoring zero length \N{} in character class in regex; marked by
<-- HERE in m/%s/
- (W regexp) Named Unicode character escapes ("\N{...}") may
return a zero-length sequence. When such an escape is used in a character
class its behaviour is not well defined. Check that the correct escape has
been used, and the correct charname handler is in scope.
- Illegal binary digit %s
- (F) You used a digit other than 0 or 1 in a binary 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 character after '_' in prototype for %s : %s
- (W illegalproto) An illegal character was found in a prototype
declaration. The '_' in a prototype must be followed by a ';', indicating
the rest of the parameters are optional, or one of '@' or '%', since those
two will accept 0 or more final parameters.
- Illegal character \%o (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 character in prototype for %s : %s
- (W illegalproto) An illegal character was found in a prototype
declaration. Legal characters in prototypes are $, @, %, *, ;, [, ],
&, \, and +. Perhaps you were trying to write a subroutine signature
but didn't enable that feature first ("use feature
'signatures'"), so your signature was instead interpreted as a bad
prototype.
- Illegal declaration of anonymous subroutine
- (F) When using the "sub" keyword to construct an anonymous
subroutine, you must always specify a block of code. See perlsub.
- Illegal declaration of subroutine %s
- (F) A subroutine was not declared correctly. See perlsub.
- 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 hexadecimal digit %s ignored
- (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.
- 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 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 octal digit %s
- (F) You used an 8 or 9 in an octal number.
- Illegal octal digit %s ignored
- (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.
- Illegal pattern in regex; marked by <-- HERE in m/%s/
- (F) You wrote something like
(?+foo)
The "+" is valid only when followed by digits, indicating a
capturing group. See "(? PARNO)".
- Illegal switch in PERL5OPT: -%c
- (X) The PERL5OPT environment variable may only be used to set the
following switches: -[CDIMUdmtw].
- Ill-formed CRTL environ value "%s"
- (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.
- Ill-formed message in prime_env_iter: |%s|
- (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.
- (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 "G_KEEPERR" in
perlcall.
- Incomplete expression within '(?[ ])' in regex; marked by
<-- HERE in m/%s/
- (F) There was a syntax error within the "(?[ ])". This can
happen if the expression inside the construct was completely empty, or if
there are too many or few operands for the number of operators. Perl is
not smart enough to give you a more precise indication as to what is
wrong.
- Inconsistent hierarchy during C3 merge of class '%s': merging failed on
parent '%s'
- (F) The method resolution order (MRO) of the given class is not
C3-consistent, and you have enabled the C3 MRO for this class. See the C3
documentation in mro for more information.
- In EBCDIC the v-string components cannot exceed 2147483647
- (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).
- Infinite recursion in regex
- (F) You used a pattern that references itself without consuming any input
text. You should check the pattern to ensure that recursive patterns
either consume text or fail.
- Initialization of state variables in list context currently forbidden
- (F) Currently the implementation of "state" only permits the
initialization of scalar variables in scalar context. Re-write "state
($a) = 42" as "state $a = 42" to change from list to scalar
context. Constructions such as "state (@a) = foo()" will be
supported in a future perl release.
- %%s[%s] in scalar context better written as $%s[%s]
- (W syntax) In scalar context, you've used an array index/value 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 in the value it returns
and when evaluating its argument, while %foo[&bar] provides a list
context to its subscript, which can do weird things if you're expecting
only one subscript. When called in list context, it also returns the index
(what &bar returns) in addition to the value.
- %%s{%s} in scalar context better written as $%s{%s}
- (W syntax) In scalar context, you've used a hash key/value 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 in the value it returns
and when evaluating its argument, while @foo{&bar} and provides a list
context to its subscript, which can do weird things if you're expecting
only one subscript. When called in list context, it also returns the key
in addition to the value.
- 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. See perlsec
for more information.
- 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. Also, the PATH must not contain any relative
directory. See perlsec.
- 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}, $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.
- Insecure user-defined property %s
- (F) Perl detected tainted data when trying to compile a regular expression
that contains a call to a user-defined character property function, i.e.
"\p{IsFoo}" or "\p{InFoo}". See "User-Defined
Character Properties" in perlunicode and perlsec.
- In '(?...)', splitting the initial '(?' is deprecated in regex; marked by
<-- HERE in m/%s/
- (D regexp, deprecated) The two-character sequence "(?" in this
context in a regular expression pattern should be an indivisible token,
with nothing intervening between the "(" and the "?",
but you separated them. Due to an accident of implementation, this
prohibition was not enforced, but we do plan to forbid it in a future Perl
version. This message serves as giving you fair warning of this pending
change.
- Integer overflow in format string for %s
- (F) The indexes and widths specified in the format string of
"printf()" or "sprintf()" are too large. The numbers
must not overflow the size of integers for your architecture.
- Integer overflow in %s number
- (S 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.
- Integer overflow in srand
- (S overflow) The number you have passed to srand is too big to fit in your
architecture's integer representation. The number has been replaced with
the largest integer supported (0xFFFFFFFF on 32-bit architectures). This
means you may be getting less randomness than you expect, because
different random seeds above the maximum will return the same sequence of
random numbers.
- Integer overflow in version
- Integer overflow in version %d
- (W overflow) Some portion of a version initialization is too large for the
size of integers for your architecture. This is not a warning because
there is no rational reason for a version to try and use an element larger
than typically 2**32. This is usually caused by trying to use some odd
mathematical operation as a version, like 100/9.
- Internal disaster in regex; marked by <-- HERE in m/%s/
- (P) Something went badly wrong in the regular expression parser. The
<-- HERE shows whereabouts in the regular expression the problem
was discovered.
- Internal inconsistency in tracking vforks
- (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" in 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.
- internal %<num>p might conflict with future printf extensions
- (S internal) Perl's internal routine that handles "printf" and
"sprintf" formatting follows a slightly different set of rules
when called from C or XS code. Specifically, formats consisting of digits
followed by "p" (e.g., "%7p") are reserved for future
use. If you see this message, then an XS module tried to call that routine
with one such reserved format.
- Internal urp in regex; marked by <-- HERE in m/%s/
- (P) Something went badly awry in the regular expression parser. The
<-- HERE shows whereabouts in the regular expression the problem
was discovered.
- %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. See "Terms and List Operators
(Leftward)" in perlop.
- Invalid %s attribute: %s
- (F) The indicated attribute for a subroutine or variable was not
recognized by Perl or by a user-supplied handler. See attributes.
- Invalid %s attributes: %s
- (F) The indicated attributes for a subroutine or variable were not
recognized by Perl or by a user-supplied handler. See attributes.
- Invalid character in charnames alias definition; marked by
<-- HERE in '%s
- (F) You tried to create a custom alias for a character name, with the
":alias" option to "use charnames" and the specified
character in the indicated name isn't valid. See "CUSTOM
ALIASES" in charnames.
- Invalid \0 character in %s for %s: %s\0%s
- (W syscalls) Embedded \0 characters in pathnames or other system call
arguments produce a warning as of 5.20. The parts after the \0 were
formerly ignored by system calls.
- Invalid character in \N{...}; marked by <-- HERE in \N{%s}
- (F) Only certain characters are valid for character names. The indicated
one isn't. See "CUSTOM ALIASES" in charnames.
- Invalid conversion in %s: "%s"
- (W printf) Perl does not understand the given format conversion. See
"sprintf" in perlfunc.
- Invalid escape in the specified encoding in regex; marked by
<-- HERE in m/%s/
- (W regexp)(F) The numeric escape (for example "\xHH") of value
< 256 didn't correspond to a single character through the conversion
from the encoding specified by the encoding pragma. The escape was
replaced with REPLACEMENT CHARACTER (U+FFFD) instead, except within
"(?[ ])", where it is a fatal error. The
<-- HERE shows whereabouts in the regular expression the escape
was discovered.
- Invalid hexadecimal number in \N{U+...}
- Invalid hexadecimal number in \N{U+...} in regex; marked by
<-- HERE in m/%s/
- (F) The character constant represented by "..." is not a valid
hexadecimal number. Either it is empty, or you tried to use a character
other than 0 - 9 or A - F, a - f in a hexadecimal number.
- Invalid module name %s with -%c option: contains single ':'
- (F) The module argument to perl's -m and -M command-line
options cannot contain single colons in the module name, but only in the
arguments after "=". In other words, -MFoo::Bar=:baz is
ok, but -MFoo:Bar=baz is not.
- Invalid mro name: '%s'
- (F) You tried to "mro::set_mro("classname",
"foo")" or "use mro 'foo'", where "foo"
is not a valid method resolution order (MRO). Currently, the only valid
ones supported are "dfs" and "c3", unless you have
loaded a module that is a MRO plugin. See mro and perlmroapi.
- Invalid negative number (%s) in chr
- (W utf8) You passed a negative number to "chr". Negative numbers
are not valid character numbers, so it returns the Unicode replacement
character (U+FFFD).
- invalid option -D%c, use -D'' to see choices
- (S debugging) Perl was called with invalid debugger flags. Call perl with
the -D option with no flags to see the list of acceptable values.
See also "-Dletters" in perlrun.
- Invalid [] range "%s" in regex; marked by <-- HERE in
m/%s/
- (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 whereabouts in the regular expression the problem was discovered.
See perlre.
- Invalid range "%s" in transliteration operator
- (F) The range specified in the tr/// or y/// operator had a minimum
character greater than the maximum character. See perlop.
- 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
parenthesised parameter list, perhaps that list was terminated too soon.
See attributes.
- Invalid separator character %s in PerlIO layer specification %s
- (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.
- Invalid strict version format (%s)
- (F) A version number did not meet the "strict" criteria for
versions. A "strict" version number is a positive decimal number
(integer or decimal-fraction) without exponentiation or else a
dotted-decimal v-string with a leading 'v' character and at least three
components. The parenthesized text indicates which criteria were not met.
See the version module for more details on allowed version formats.
- Invalid type '%s' in %s
- (F) The given character is not a valid pack or unpack type. See
"pack" in perlfunc.
(W) The given character is not a valid pack or unpack type but used to be
silently ignored.
- Invalid version format (%s)
- (F) A version number did not meet the "lax" criteria for
versions. A "lax" version number is a positive decimal number
(integer or decimal-fraction) without exponentiation or else a
dotted-decimal v-string. If the v-string has fewer than three components,
it must have a leading 'v' character. Otherwise, the leading 'v' is
optional. Both decimal and dotted-decimal versions may have a trailing
"alpha" component separated by an underscore character after a
fractional or dotted-decimal component. The parenthesized text indicates
which criteria were not met. See the version module for more details on
allowed version formats.
- Invalid version object
- (F) The internal structure of the version object was invalid. Perhaps the
internals were modified directly in some way or an arbitrary reference was
blessed into the "version" class.
- In '(*VERB...)', splitting the initial '(*' is deprecated in regex; marked
by <-- HERE in m/%s/
- (D regexp, deprecated) The two-character sequence "(*" in this
context in a regular expression pattern should be an indivisible token,
with nothing intervening between the "(" and the "*",
but you separated them. Due to an accident of implementation, this
prohibition was not enforced, but we do plan to forbid it in a future Perl
version. This message serves as giving you fair warning of this pending
change.
- ioctl is not implemented
- (F) Your machine apparently doesn't implement ioctl(), which is
pretty strange for a machine that supports C.
- ioctl() on unopened %s
- (W unopened) You tried ioctl() on a filehandle that was never
opened. Check your control flow and number of arguments.
- IO layers (like '%s') unavailable
- (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'.
- IO::Socket::atmark not implemented on this architecture
- (F) Your machine doesn't implement the sockatmark() functionality,
neither as a system call nor an ioctl call (SIOCATMARK).
- $* is no longer supported
- (D deprecated, syntax) The special variable $*, deprecated in older perls,
has been removed as of 5.10.0 and is no longer supported. In previous
versions of perl the use of $* enabled or disabled multi-line matching
within a string.
Instead of using $* you should use the "/m" (and maybe
"/s") regexp modifiers. You can enable "/m" for a
lexical scope (even a whole file) with "use re '/m'". (In older
versions: when $* was set to a true value then all regular expressions
behaved as if they were written using "/m".)
- $# is no longer supported
- (D deprecated, syntax) The special variable $#, deprecated in older perls,
has been removed as of 5.10.0 and is no longer supported. You should use
the printf/sprintf functions instead.
- '%s' is not a code reference
- (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.
- '%s' is not an overloadable type
- (W overload) You tried to overload a constant type the overload package is
unaware of.
- -i used with no filenames on the command line, reading from STDIN
- (S inplace) The "-i" option was passed on the command line,
indicating that the script is intended to edit files in place, but no
files were given. This is usually a mistake, since editing STDIN in place
doesn't make sense, and can be confusing because it can make perl look
like it is hanging when it is really just trying to read from STDIN. You
should either pass a filename to edit, or remove "-i" from the
command line. See perlrun for more details.
- Junk on end of regexp in regex m/%s/
- (P) The regular expression parser is confused.
- keys on reference is experimental
- (S experimental::autoderef) "keys" with a scalar argument is
experimental and may change or be removed in a future Perl version. If you
want to take the risk of using this feature, simply disable this warning:
no warnings "experimental::autoderef";
- 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. See
"last" in perlfunc.
- 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. See
"last" in perlfunc.
- 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. See
"last" in perlfunc.
- leaving effective %s failed
- (F) While under the "use filetest" pragma, switching the real
and effective uids or gids failed.
- length/code after end of string in unpack
- (F) While unpacking, the string buffer was already used up when an unpack
length/code combination tried to obtain more data. This results in an
undefined value for the length. See "pack" in perlfunc.
- length() used on %s (did you mean "scalar(%s)"?)
- (W syntax) You used length() on either an array or a hash when you
probably wanted a count of the items.
Array size can be obtained by doing:
scalar(@array);
The number of items in a hash can be obtained by doing:
scalar(keys %hash);
- Lexing code attempted to stuff non-Latin-1 character into Latin-1
input
- (F) An extension is attempting to insert text into the current parse
(using lex_stuff_pvn or similar), but tried to insert a character that
couldn't be part of the current input. This is an inherent pitfall of the
stuffing mechanism, and one of the reasons to avoid it. Where it is
necessary to stuff, stuffing only plain ASCII is recommended.
- Lexing code internal error (%s)
- (F) Lexing code supplied by an extension violated the lexer's API in a
detectable way.
- 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? See
"listen" in perlfunc.
- List form of piped open not implemented
- (F) On some platforms, notably Windows, the three-or-more-arguments form
of "open" does not support pipes, such as "open($pipe,
'|-', @args)". Use the two-argument "open($pipe, '|prog arg1
arg2...')" form instead.
- localtime(%f) failed
- (W overflow) You called "localtime" with a number that it could
not handle: too large, too small, or NaN. The returned value is
"undef".
- localtime(%f) too large
- (W overflow) You called "localtime" with a number that was
larger than it can reliably handle and "localtime" probably
returned the wrong date. This warning is also triggered with NaN (the
special not-a-number value).
- localtime(%f) too small
- (W overflow) You called "localtime" with a number that was
smaller than it can reliably handle and "localtime" probably
returned the wrong date.
- Lookbehind longer than %d not implemented in regex m/%s/
- (F) There is currently a limit on the length of string which lookbehind
can handle. This restriction may be eased in a future release.
- Lost precision when %s %f by 1
- (W imprecision) The value you attempted to increment or decrement by one
is too large for the underlying floating point representation to store
accurately, hence the target of "++" or "--" is
unchanged. Perl issues this warning because it has already switched from
integers to floating point when values are too large for integers, and now
even floating point is insufficient. You may wish to switch to using
Math::BigInt explicitly.
- lstat() on filehandle%s
- (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.)
- lvalue attribute %s already-defined subroutine
- (W misc) Although attributes.pm allows this, turning the lvalue attribute
on or off on a Perl subroutine that is already defined does not always
work properly. It may or may not do what you want, depending on what code
is inside the subroutine, with exact details subject to change between
Perl versions. Only do this if you really know what you are doing.
- lvalue attribute ignored after the subroutine has been defined
- (W misc) Using the ":lvalue" declarative syntax to make a Perl
subroutine an lvalue subroutine after it has been defined is not
permitted. To make the subroutine an lvalue subroutine, add the lvalue
attribute to the definition, or put the "sub foo :lvalue;"
declaration before the definition.
See also attributes.pm.
- Magical list constants are not supported
- (F) You assigned a magical array to a stash element, and then tried to use
the subroutine from the same slot. You are asking Perl to do something it
cannot do, details subject to change between Perl versions.
- Malformed integer in [] in pack
- (F) Between the brackets enclosing a numeric repeat count only digits are
permitted. See "pack" in perlfunc.
- Malformed integer in [] in unpack
- (F) Between the brackets enclosing a numeric repeat count only digits are
permitted. See "pack" in perlfunc.
- Malformed PERLLIB_PREFIX
- (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.
- Malformed prototype for %s: %s
- (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. Perhaps the function's author was trying to write a subroutine
signature but didn't enable that feature first ("use feature
'signatures'"), so the signature was instead interpreted as a bad
prototype.
- Malformed UTF-8 character (%s)
- (S utf8)(F) Perl detected a string that didn't comply with UTF-8 encoding
rules, even though it had the UTF8 flag on.
One possible cause is that you set the UTF8 flag yourself for data that you
thought to be in UTF-8 but it wasn't (it was for example legacy 8-bit
data). To guard against this, you can use Encode::decode_utf8.
If you use the ":encoding(UTF-8)" PerlIO layer for input, invalid
byte sequences are handled gracefully, but if you use ":utf8",
the flag is set without validating the data, possibly resulting in this
error message.
See also "Handling Malformed Data" in Encode.
- Malformed UTF-8 character immediately after '%s'
- (F) You said "use utf8", but the program file doesn't comply
with UTF-8 encoding rules. The message prints out the properly encoded
characters just before the first bad one. If "utf8" warnings are
enabled, a warning is generated that gives more details about the type of
malformation.
- Malformed UTF-8 returned by \N{%s} immediately after '%s'
- (F) The charnames handler returned malformed UTF-8.
- Malformed UTF-8 string in '%c' format in unpack
- (F) You tried to unpack something that didn't comply with UTF-8 encoding
rules and perl was unable to guess how to make more progress.
- Malformed UTF-8 string in pack
- (F) You tried to pack something that didn't comply with UTF-8 encoding
rules and perl was unable to guess how to make more progress.
- Malformed UTF-8 string in unpack
- (F) You tried to unpack something that didn't comply with UTF-8 encoding
rules and perl was unable to guess how to make more progress.
- Malformed UTF-16 surrogate
- (F) Perl thought it was reading UTF-16 encoded character data but while
doing it Perl met a malformed Unicode surrogate.
- Mandatory parameter follows optional parameter
- (F) In a subroutine signature, you wrote something like "$a = undef,
$b", making an earlier parameter optional and a later one mandatory.
Parameters are filled from left to right, so it's impossible for the
caller to omit an earlier one and pass a later one. If you want to act as
if the parameters are filled from right to left, declare the rightmost
optional and then shuffle the parameters around in the subroutine's
body.
- Matched non-Unicode code point 0x%X against Unicode property; may not be
portable
- (S non_unicode) Perl allows strings to contain a superset of Unicode code
points; each code point may be as large as what is storable in an unsigned
integer on your system, but these may not be accepted by other
languages/systems. This message occurs when you matched a string
containing such a code point against a regular expression pattern, and the
code point was matched against a Unicode property, "\p{...}" or
"\P{...}". Unicode properties are only defined on Unicode code
points, so the result of this match is undefined by Unicode, but Perl
(starting in v5.20) treats non-Unicode code points as if they were typical
unassigned Unicode ones, and matched this one accordingly. Whether a given
property matches these code points or not is specified in "Properties
accessible through \p{} and \P{}" in perluniprops.
This message is suppressed (unless it has been made fatal) if it is
immaterial to the results of the match if the code point is Unicode or
not. For example, the property "\p{ASCII_Hex_Digit}" only can
match the 22 characters "[0-9A-Fa-f]", so obviously all other
code points, Unicode or not, won't match it. (And
"\P{ASCII_Hex_Digit}" will match every code point except these
22.)
Getting this message indicates that the outcome of the match arguably should
have been the opposite of what actually happened. If you think that is the
case, you may wish to make the "non_unicode" warnings category
fatal; if you agree with Perl's decision, you may wish to turn off this
category.
See "Beyond Unicode code points" in perlunicode for more
information.
- %s matches null string many times in regex; marked by <-- HERE
in m/%s/
- (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 whereabouts in the regular expression the problem
was discovered. See perlre.
- Maximal count of pending signals (%u) exceeded
- (F) Perl aborted due to too high a number of signals pending. This usually
indicates that your operating system tried to deliver signals too fast
(with a very high priority), starving the perl process from resources it
would need to reach a point where it can process signals safely. (See
"Deferred Signals (Safe Signals)" in perlipc.)
- "%s" may clash with future reserved word
- (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".
- '%' may not be used in pack
- (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" in perlfunc.
- 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. See overload.
- 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 it eventually ended
earlier on the current line.
- Misplaced _ in number
- (W syntax) An underscore (underbar) in a numeric constant did not separate
two digits.
- Missing argument in %s
- (W uninitialized) A printf-type format required more arguments than were
supplied.
- Missing argument to -%c
- (F) The argument to the indicated command line switch must follow
immediately after the switch, without intervening spaces.
- Missing braces on \N{}
- Missing braces on \N{} in regex; marked by <-- HERE in
m/%s/
- (F) Wrong syntax of character name literal "\N{charname}" within
double-quotish context. This can also happen when there is a space (or
comment) between the "\N" and the "{" in a regex with
the "/x" modifier. This modifier does not change the requirement
that the brace immediately follow the "\N".
- Missing braces on \o{}
- (F) A "\o" must be followed immediately by a "{" in
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 control char name in \c
- (F) A double-quoted string ended with "\c", without the required
control character name.
- Missing ']' in prototype for %s : %s
- (W illegalproto) A grouping was started with "[" but never
closed with "]".
- Missing name in "%s sub"
- (F) The syntax for lexically scoped subroutines requires that they have a
name with which they can be found.
- 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 operator before %s?)
- (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.
- Missing right brace on \%c{} in regex; marked by <-- HERE in
m/%s/
- (F) Missing right brace in "\x{...}", "\p{...}",
"\P{...}", or "\N{...}".
- Missing right brace on \N{}
- Missing right brace on \N{} or unescaped left brace after \N
- (F) "\N" has two meanings.
The traditional one has it followed by a name enclosed in braces, meaning
the character (or sequence of characters) given by that name. Thus
"\N{ASTERISK}" is another way of writing "*", valid in
both double-quoted strings and regular expression patterns. In patterns,
it doesn't have the meaning an unescaped "*" does.
Starting in Perl 5.12.0, "\N" also can have an additional meaning
(only) in patterns, namely to match a non-newline character. (This is
short for "[^\n]", and like "." but is not affected by
the "/s" regex modifier.)
This can lead to some ambiguities. When "\N" is not followed
immediately by a left brace, Perl assumes the "[^\n]" meaning.
Also, if the braces form a valid quantifier such as "\N{3}" or
"\N{5,}", Perl assumes that this means to match the given
quantity of non-newlines (in these examples, 3; and 5 or more,
respectively). In all other case, where there is a "\N{" and a
matching "}", Perl assumes that a character name is desired.
However, if there is no matching "}", Perl doesn't know if it was
mistakenly omitted, or if "[^\n]{" was desired, and raises this
error. If you meant the former, add the right brace; if you meant the
latter, escape the brace with a backslash, like so: "\N\{"
- 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.
- (Missing semicolon on previous line?)
- (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.
- 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.
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
- Modification of non-creatable array value attempted, %s
- (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.
- Modification of non-creatable hash value attempted, %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".
- Module name required with -%c option
- (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".
- More than one argument to '%s' open
- (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" in perlfunc for details.
- mprotect for COW string %p %u failed with %d
- (S) You compiled perl with -DPERL_DEBUG_READONLY_COW (see
"Copy on Write" in perlguts), but a shared string buffer could
not be made read-only.
- mprotect for %p %u failed with %d
- (S) You compiled perl with -DPERL_DEBUG_READONLY_OPS (see
perlhacktips), but an op tree could not be made read-only.
- mprotect RW for COW string %p %u failed with %d
- (S) You compiled perl with -DPERL_DEBUG_READONLY_COW (see
"Copy on Write" in perlguts), but a read-only shared string
buffer could not be made mutable.
- mprotect RW for %p %u failed with %d
- (S) You compiled perl with -DPERL_DEBUG_READONLY_OPS (see
perlhacktips), but a read-only op tree could not be made mutable before
freeing the ops.
- 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.
- '/' must follow a numeric type in unpack
- (F) You had an unpack template that contained a '/', but this did not
follow some unpack specification producing a numeric value. See
"pack" in perlfunc.
- "my sub" not yet implemented
- (F) Lexically scoped subroutines are not yet implemented. Don't try that
yet.
- "my %s" used in sort comparison
- (W syntax) The package variables $a and $b are used for sort comparisons.
You used $a or $b in as an operand to the "<=>" or
"cmp" operator inside a sort comparison block, 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.
- "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 on the front. Use
local() if you want to localize a package variable.
- 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 also
provided for this purpose.
NOTE: This warning detects package symbols that have been used only once.
This means lexical variables will never trigger this warning. It also
means that all of the package variables $c, @c, %c, as well as *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. Symbols beginning with an underscore and symbols
using special identifiers (q.v. perldata) are exempt from this
warning.
- Need exactly 3 octal digits in regex; marked by <-- HERE in
m/%s/
- (F) Within "(?[ ])", all constants
interpreted as octal need to be exactly 3 digits long. This helps catch
some ambiguities. If your constant is too short, add leading zeros, like
(?[ [ \078 ] ]) # Syntax error!
(?[ [ \0078 ] ]) # Works
(?[ [ \007 8 ] ]) # Clearer
The maximum number this construct can express is "\777". If you
need a larger one, you need to use \o{} instead. If you meant two separate
things, you need to separate them:
(?[ [ \7776 ] ]) # Syntax error!
(?[ [ \o{7776} ] ]) # One meaning
(?[ [ \777 6 ] ]) # Another meaning
(?[ [ \777 \006 ] ]) # Still another
- Negative '/' count in unpack
- (F) The length count obtained from a length/code unpack operation was
negative. See "pack" in perlfunc.
- 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.
- Negative offset to vec in lvalue context
- (F) When "vec" is called in an lvalue context, the second
argument must be greater than or equal to zero.
- Nested quantifiers in regex; marked by <-- HERE in m/%s/
- (F) You can't quantify a quantifier without intervening parentheses. So
things like ** or +* or ?* are illegal. The <-- HERE shows
whereabouts in the regular expression the problem was discovered.
Note that the minimal matching quantifiers, "*?", "+?",
and "??" appear to be nested quantifiers, but aren't. See
perlre.
- %s never introduced
- (S internal) The symbol in question was declared but somehow went out of
scope before it could possibly have been used.
- next::method/next::can/maybe::next::method cannot find enclosing
method
- (F) "next::method" needs to be called within the context of a
real method in a real package, and it could not find such a context. See
mro.
- \N in a character class must be a named character: \N{...} in regex;
marked by <-- HERE in m/%s/
- (F) The new (as of Perl 5.12) meaning of "\N" as
"[^\n]" is not valid in a bracketed character class, for the
same reason that "." in a character class loses its specialness:
it matches almost everything, which is probably not what you want.
- \N{} in character class restricted to one character in regex; marked by
<-- HERE in m/%s/
- (F) Named Unicode character escapes ("\N{...}") may return a
multi-character sequence. Such an escape may not be used in a character
class, because character classes always match one character of input.
Check that the correct escape has been used, and the correct charname
handler is in scope. The <-- HERE shows whereabouts in the
regular expression the problem was discovered.
- \N{NAME} must be resolved by the lexer in regex; marked by
<-- HERE in m/%s/
- (F) When compiling a regex pattern, an unresolved named character or
sequence was encountered. This can happen in any of several ways that
bypass the lexer, such as using single-quotish context, or an extra
backslash in double-quotish:
$re = '\N{SPACE}'; # Wrong!
$re = "\\N{SPACE}"; # Wrong!
/$re/;
Instead, use double-quotes with a single backslash:
$re = "\N{SPACE}"; # ok
/$re/;
The lexer can be bypassed as well by creating the pattern from smaller
components:
$re = '\N';
/${re}{SPACE}/; # Wrong!
It's not a good idea to split a construct in the middle like this, and it
doesn't work here. Instead use the solution above.
Finally, the message also can happen under the "/x" regex modifier
when the "\N" is separated by spaces from the "{", in
which case, remove the spaces.
/\N {SPACE}/x; # Wrong!
/\N{SPACE}/x; # ok
- No %s allowed while running setuid
- (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.
- No code specified for -%c
- (F) Perl's -e and -E command-line options require an
argument. If you want to run an empty program, pass the empty string as a
separate argument or run a program consisting of a single 0 or 1:
perl -e ""
perl -e0
perl -e1
- 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'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" in perlfunc and "import" in 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?
- No command into which to pipe on command line
- (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.
- No DB::DB routine defined
- (F) The currently executing code was compiled with the -d switch,
but for some reason the current debugger (e.g. perl5db.pl or a
"Devel::" module) didn't define a routine to be called at the
beginning of each statement.
- No dbm on this machine
- (P) This is counted as an internal error, because every machine should
supply dbm nowadays, because Perl comes with SDBM. See SDBM_File.
- No DB::sub routine defined
- (F) The currently executing code was compiled with the -d switch,
but for some reason the current debugger (e.g. perl5db.pl or a
"Devel::" module) didn't define a "DB::sub" routine to
be called at the beginning of each ordinary subroutine call.
- No directory specified for -I
- (F) The -I command-line switch requires a directory name as part of
the same argument. Use -Ilib, for instance. -I lib
won't work.
- No error file after 2> or 2>> on command line
- (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 the name of the file to which to write data destined for
stderr.
- No group ending character '%c' found in template
- (F) A pack or unpack template has an opening '(' or '[' without its
matching counterpart. See "pack" in perlfunc.
- No input file after < on command line
- (F) An error peculiar to VMS. Perl handles its own command line
redirection, and found a '<' on the command line, but can't find the
name of the file from which to read data for stdin.
- No next::method '%s' found for %s
- (F) "next::method" found no further instances of this method
name in the remaining packages of the MRO of this class. If you don't want
it throwing an exception, use "maybe::next::method" or
"next::can". See mro.
- Non-hex character in regex; marked by <-- HERE in m/%s/
- (F) In a regular expression, there was a non-hexadecimal character where a
hex one was expected, like
(?[ [ \xDG ] ])
(?[ [ \x{DEKA} ] ])
- Non-octal character in regex; marked by <-- HERE in m/%s/
- (F) In a regular expression, there was a non-octal character where an
octal one was expected, like
(?[ [ \o{1278} ] ])
- Non-octal character '%c'. Resolved as "%s"
- (W digit) In parsing an octal numeric constant, a character was
unexpectedly encountered that isn't octal. The resulting value is as
indicated.
- "no" not allowed in expression
- (F) The "no" keyword is recognized and executed at compile time,
and returns no useful value. See perlmod.
- Non-string passed as bitmask
- (W misc) A number has been passed as a bitmask argument to
select(). Use the vec() function to construct the file
descriptor bitmasks for select. See "select" in perlfunc.
- No output file after > on command line
- (F) An error peculiar to VMS. Perl handles its own command line
redirection, and found a lone '>' at the end of the command line, so it
doesn't know where you wanted to redirect stdout.
- No output file after > or >> on command line
- (F) An error peculiar to VMS. Perl handles its own command line
redirection, and found a '>' or a '>>' on the command line, but
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 that doesn'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 such class %s
- (F) You provided a class qualifier in a "my", "our" or
"state" declaration, but this class doesn't exist at this point
in your program.
- No such class field "%s" in variable %s of type %s
- (F) You tried to access a key from a hash through the indicated typed
variable but that key is not allowed by the package of the same type. The
indicated package has restricted the set of allowed keys using the fields
pragma.
- No such hook: %s
- (F) You specified a signal hook that was not recognized by Perl.
Currently, Perl accepts "__DIE__" and "__WARN__" as
valid signal hooks.
- No such pipe open
- (P) An error peculiar to VMS. The internal routine my_pclose()
tried to close a pipe which 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) You specified a signal name as a subscript to %SIG that was not
recognized. Say "kill -l" in your shell to see the valid signal
names on your system.
- 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. See
also perlref.
- 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. See perlref.
- 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. See perlref.
- 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. See perlref.
- Not an unblessed ARRAY reference
- (F) You passed a reference to a blessed array to "push",
"shift" or another array function. These only accept unblessed
array references or arrays beginning explicitly with "@".
- 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. See perlref.
- 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. See
also perlref.
- 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. See overload.
- 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. See perlform.
- %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 into Perl
yourself.
- (?[...]) not valid in locale in regex; marked by <-- HERE in
m/%s/
- (F) "(?[...])" cannot be used within the scope of a
"use locale" or with an "/l" regular expression
modifier, as that would require deferring to run-time the calculation of
what it should evaluate to, and it is regex compile-time only.
- no UTC offset information; assuming local time is UTC
- (S) A warning peculiar to VMS. Perl was unable to find the local timezone
offset, so it's assuming that local system time is equivalent to UTC. If
it's not, define the logical name SYS$TIMEZONE_DIFFERENTIAL to
translate to the number of seconds which need to be added to UTC to get
local time.
- Null filename used
- (F) You can't require the null filename, especially because on many
machines that means the current directory! See "require" in
perlfunc.
- NULL OP IN RUN
- (S debugging) Some internal routine called run() with a null opcode
pointer.
- Null picture in formline
- (F) The first argument to formline must be a valid format picture
specification. It was found to be empty, which probably means you supplied
it an uninitialized value. See perlform.
- 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
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").
- Number with no digits
- (F) Perl was looking for a number but found nothing that looked like a
number. This happens, for example with "\o{}", with no number
between the braces.
- Octal number > 037777777777 non-portable
- (W portable) The octal number you specified is larger than 2**32-1
(4294967295) and therefore non-portable between systems. See perlport for
more on portability concerns.
- Odd name/value argument for subroutine
- (F) A subroutine using a slurpy hash parameter in its signature received
an odd number of arguments to populate the hash. It requires the arguments
to be paired, with the same number of keys as values. The caller of the
subroutine is presumably at fault. Inconveniently, this error will be
reported at the location of the subroutine, not that of the caller.
- Odd number of arguments for overload::constant
- (W overload) The call to overload::constant contained an odd number of
arguments. The arguments should come in pairs.
- Odd number of elements in anonymous hash
- (W misc) You specified an odd number of elements to initialize a hash,
which is odd, because hashes come in key/value pairs.
- 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)(W layer) You tried to do a read/write/send/recv/seek operation with an
offset pointing outside the buffer. This is difficult to imagine. The sole
exceptions to this are that zero padding will take place when going past
the end of the string when either "sysread()"ing a file, or when
seeking past the end of a scalar opened for I/O (in anticipation of future
reads and to imitate the behaviour with real files).
- %s() on unopened %s
- (W unopened) An I/O operation was attempted on a filehandle that was never
initialized. You need to do an open(), a sysopen(), or a
socket() call, or call a constructor from the FileHandle
package.
- -%s on unopened filehandle %s
- (W unopened) You tried to invoke a file test operator on a filehandle that
isn't open. Check your control flow. See also "-X" in
perlfunc.
- oops: oopsAV
- (S internal) An internal warning that the grammar is screwed up.
- oops: oopsHV
- (S internal) An internal warning that the grammar is screwed up.
- Opening dirhandle %s also as a file
- (D io, deprecated) You used open() to associate a filehandle to a
symbol (glob or scalar) that already holds a dirhandle. Although legal,
this idiom might render your code confusing and is deprecated.
- Opening filehandle %s also as a directory
- (D io, deprecated) You used opendir() to associate a dirhandle to a
symbol (glob or scalar) that already holds a filehandle. Although legal,
this idiom might render your code confusing and is deprecated.
- Operand with no preceding operator in regex; marked by <-- HERE
in m/%s/
- (F) You wrote something like
(?[ \p{Digit} \p{Thai} ])
There are two operands, but no operator giving how you want to combine
them.
- 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. See
overload.
- Operation "%s" returns its argument for non-Unicode code point
0x%X
- (S non_unicode) You performed an operation requiring Unicode semantics on
a code point that is not in Unicode, so what it should do is not defined.
Perl has chosen to have it do nothing, and warn you.
If the operation shown is "ToFold", it means that case-insensitive
matching in a regular expression was done on the code point.
If you know what you are doing you can turn off this warning by "no
warnings 'non_unicode';".
- Operation "%s" returns its argument for UTF-16 surrogate
U+%X
- (S surrogate) You performed an operation requiring Unicode semantics on a
Unicode surrogate. Unicode frowns upon the use of surrogates for anything
but storing strings in UTF-16, but semantics are (reluctantly) defined for
the surrogates, and they are to do nothing for this operation. Because the
use of surrogates can be dangerous, Perl warns.
If the operation shown is "ToFold", it means that case-insensitive
matching in a regular expression was done on the code point.
If you know what you are doing you can turn off this warning by "no
warnings 'surrogate';".
- Operator or semicolon missing before %s
- (S ambiguous) You used a variable or subroutine call where 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
say "*foo *foo" it will be interpreted as if you said "*foo
* 'foo'".
- Optional parameter lacks default expression
- (F) In a subroutine signature, you wrote something like "$a =",
making a named optional parameter without a default value. A nameless
optional parameter is permitted to have no default value, but a named one
must have a specific default. You probably want "$a =
undef".
- "our" variable %s redeclared
- (W misc) You seem to have already declared the same global once before in
the current lexical scope.
- Out of memory!
- (X) The malloc() function returned 0, indicating there was
insufficient remaining memory (or virtual memory) to satisfy the request.
Perl has no option but to exit immediately.
At least in Unix you may be able to get past this by increasing your process
datasize limits: in csh/tcsh use "limit" and "limit
datasize n" (where "n" is the number of kilobytes) to check
the current limits and change them, and in ksh/bash/zsh use "ulimit
-a" and "ulimit -d n", respectively.
- Out of memory during %s extend
- (X) An attempt was made to extend an array, a list, or a string beyond the
largest possible memory allocation.
- Out of memory during "large" request for %s
- (F) The malloc() function returned 0, indicating there was
insufficient remaining memory (or virtual memory) 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 request for %s
- (X)(F) The malloc() function returned 0, indicating there was
insufficient remaining memory (or virtual memory) 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, 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, and the error message will include the line and
file where the failed request happened.
- 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].
- 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.
- '.' outside of string in pack
- (F) The argument to a '.' in your template tried to move the working
position to before the start of the packed string being built.
- '@' outside of string in unpack
- (F) You had a template that specified an absolute position outside the
string being unpacked. See "pack" in perlfunc.
- '@' outside of string with malformed UTF-8 in unpack
- (F) You had a template that specified an absolute position outside the
string being unpacked. The string being unpacked was also invalid UTF-8.
See "pack" in perlfunc.
- overload arg '%s' is invalid
- (W overload) The overload pragma was passed an argument it did not
recognize. Did you mistype an operator?
- Overloaded dereference did not return a reference
- (F) An object with an overloaded dereference operator was dereferenced,
but the overloaded operation did not return a reference. See
overload.
- Overloaded qr did not return a REGEXP
- (F) An object with a "qr" overload was used as part of a match,
but the overloaded operation didn't return a compiled regexp. See
overload.
- %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. See attributes.
- pack/unpack repeat count overflow
- (F) You can't specify a repeat count so large that it overflows your
signed integers. See "pack" in perlfunc.
- page overflow
- (W io) A single call to write() produced more lines than can fit on
a page. See perlform.
- panic: %s
- (P) An internal error.
- panic: attempt to call %s in %s
- (P) One of the file test operators entered a code branch that calls an ACL
related-function, but that function is not available on this platform.
Earlier checks mean that it should not be possible to enter this branch on
this platform.
- panic: child pseudo-process was never scheduled
- (P) A child pseudo-process in the ithreads implementation on Windows was
not scheduled within the time period allowed and therefore was not able to
initialize properly.
- panic: ck_grep, type=%u
- (P) Failed an internal consistency check trying to compile a grep.
- panic: ck_split, type=%u
- (P) Failed an internal consistency check trying to compile a split.
- panic: corrupt saved stack index %ld
- (P) The savestack was requested to restore more localized values than
there are in the savestack.
- panic: del_backref
- (P) 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_subst
- (P) The internal pp_subst() routine was called with invalid
operational data.
- panic: do_trans_%s
- (P) The internal do_trans routines were called with invalid operational
data.
- panic: fold_constants JMPENV_PUSH returned %d
- (P) While attempting folding constants an exception other than an
"eval" failure was caught.
- panic: frexp
- (P) The library function frexp() failed, making
printf("%f") impossible.
- panic: goto, type=%u, ix=%ld
- (P) We popped the context stack to a context with the specified label, and
then discovered it wasn't a context we know how to do a goto in.
- panic: gp_free failed to free glob pointer
- (P) The internal routine used to clear a typeglob's entries tried
repeatedly, but each time something re-created entries in the glob. Most
likely the glob contains an object with a reference back to the glob and a
destructor that adds a new object to the glob.
- panic: INTERPCASEMOD, %s
- (P) The lexer got into a bad state at a case modifier.
- panic: INTERPCONCAT, %s
- (P) The lexer got into a bad state parsing a string with brackets.
- panic: kid popen errno read
- (F) A forked child returned an incomprehensible message about its
errno.
- panic: last, type=%u
- (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 %u
- (P) The savestack probably got out of sync. At least, there was an invalid
enum on the top of it.
- panic: magic_killbackrefs
- (P) Failed an internal consistency check while trying to reset all weak
references to an object.
- panic: malloc, %s
- (P) Something requested a negative number of bytes of malloc.
- panic: memory wrap
- (P) Something tried to allocate either more memory than possible or a
negative amount.
- panic: pad_alloc, %p!=%p
- (P) The compiler got confused about which scratch pad it was allocating
and freeing temporaries and lexicals from.
- panic: pad_free curpad, %p!=%p
- (P) The compiler got confused about which scratch pad it was allocating
and freeing temporaries and lexicals from.
- panic: pad_free po
- (P) An invalid scratch pad offset was detected internally.
- panic: pad_reset curpad, %p!=%p
- (P) The compiler got confused about which scratch pad it was allocating
and freeing temporaries and lexicals from.
- panic: pad_sv po
- (P) An invalid scratch pad offset was detected internally.
- panic: pad_swipe curpad, %p!=%p
- (P) The compiler got confused about which scratch pad it was allocating
and freeing temporaries and lexicals from.
- panic: pad_swipe po
- (P) An invalid scratch pad offset was detected internally.
- panic: pp_iter, type=%u
- (P) The foreach iterator got called in a non-loop context frame.
- panic: pp_match%s
- (P) The internal pp_match() routine was called with invalid
operational data.
- panic: pp_split, pm=%p, s=%p
- (P) Something terrible went wrong in setting up for the split.
- panic: realloc, %s
- (P) Something requested a negative number of bytes of realloc.
- panic: reference miscount on nsv in sv_replace() (%d != 1)
- (P) The internal sv_replace() function was handed a new SV with a
reference count other than 1.
- panic: restartop in %s
- (P) Some internal routine requested a goto (or something like it), and
didn't supply the destination.
- panic: return, type=%u
- (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, %s
- (P) scan_num() got called on something that wasn't a number.
- panic: Sequence (?{...}): no code block found in regex m/%s/
- (P) While compiling a pattern that has embedded (?{}) or (??{}) code
blocks, perl couldn't locate the code block that should have already been
seen and compiled by perl before control passed to the regex
compiler.
- panic: strxfrm() gets absurd - a => %u, ab => %u
- (P) The interpreter's sanity check of the C function strxfrm()
failed. In your current locale the returned transformation of the string
"ab" is shorter than that of the string "a", which
makes no sense.
- panic: sv_chop %s
- (P) The sv_chop() routine was passed a position that is not within
the scalar's string buffer.
- panic: sv_insert, midend=%p, bigend=%p
- (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: unimplemented op %s (#%d) called
- (P) The compiler is screwed up and attempted to use an op that isn't
permitted at run time.
- panic: utf16_to_utf8: odd bytelen
- (P) Something tried to call utf16_to_utf8 with an odd (as opposed to even)
byte length.
- panic: utf16_to_utf8_reversed: odd bytelen
- (P) Something tried to call utf16_to_utf8_reversed with an odd (as opposed
to even) byte length.
- panic: yylex, %s
- (P) The lexer got into a bad state while processing a case modifier.
- Parentheses missing around "%s" list
- (W parenthesis) You said something like
my $foo, $bar = @_;
when you meant
my ($foo, $bar) = @_;
Remember that "my", "our", "local" and
"state" bind tighter than comma.
- Parsing code internal error (%s)
- (F) Parsing code supplied by an extension violated the parser's API in a
detectable way.
- Passing malformed UTF-8 to "%s" is deprecated
- (D deprecated, utf8) This message indicates a bug either in the Perl core
or in XS code. Such code was trying to find out if a character, allegedly
stored internally encoded as UTF-8, was of a given type, such as being
punctuation or a digit. But the character was not encoded in legal UTF-8.
The %s is replaced by a string that can be used by knowledgeable people to
determine what the type being checked against was. If "utf8"
warnings are enabled, a further message is raised, giving details of the
malformation.
- Pattern subroutine nesting without pos change exceeded limit in regex
- (F) You used a pattern that uses too many nested subpattern calls without
consuming any text. Restructure the pattern so text is consumed before the
nesting limit is exceeded.
- "-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().)
- Perl folding rules are not up-to-date for 0x%X; please use the perlbug
utility to report; in regex; marked by <-- HERE in m/%s/
- (S regexp) You used a regular expression with case-insensitive matching,
and there is a bug in Perl in which the built-in regular expression
folding rules are not accurate. This may lead to incorrect results. Please
report this as a bug using the perlbug utility.
- Perl_my_%s() not available
- (F) Your platform has very uncommon byte-order and integer size, so it was
not possible to set up some or all fixed-width byte-order conversion
functions. This is only a problem when you're using the '<' or '>'
modifiers in (un)pack templates. See "pack" in perlfunc.
- Perl %s required (did you mean %s?)--this is only %s, stopped
- (F) The code you are trying to run has asked for a newer version of Perl
than you are running. Perhaps "use 5.10" was written instead of
"use 5.010" or "use v5.10". Without the leading
"v", the number is interpreted as a decimal, with every three
digits after the decimal point representing a part of the version number.
So 5.10 is equivalent to v5.100.
- Perl %s required--this is only %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? See "require" in perlfunc.
- PERL_SH_DIR too long
- (F) An error peculiar to OS/2. PERL_SH_DIR is the directory to find the
"sh"-shell in. See "PERL_SH_DIR" in perlos2.
- PERL_SIGNALS illegal: "%s"
- (X) See "PERL_SIGNALS" in perlrun for legal values.
- Perls since %s too modern--this is %s, stopped
- (F) The code you are trying to run claims it will not run on the version
of Perl you are using because it is too new. Maybe the code needs to be
updated, or maybe it is simply wrong and the version check should just be
removed.
- perl: warning: Non hex character in '$ENV{PERL_HASH_SEED}', seed only
partially set
- (S) PERL_HASH_SEED should match /^\s*(?:0x)?[0-9a-fA-F]+\s*\z/ but it
contained a non hex character. This could mean you are not using the hash
seed you think you are.
- 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").
Exactly what were the failed locale settings varies. In the above the
settings were that the LC_ALL was "En_US" and the LANG had no
value. This error means that Perl detected that you and/or your operating
system supplier and/or system administrator have set up the so-called
locale 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, and 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 section LOCALE PROBLEMS.
- perl: warning: strange setting in '$ENV{PERL_PERTURB_KEYS}': '%s'
- (S) Perl was run with the environment variable PERL_PERTURB_KEYS defined
but containing an unexpected value. The legal values of this setting are
as follows.
Numeric | String | Result
--------+---------------+-----------------------------------------
0 | NO | Disables key traversal randomization
1 | RANDOM | Enables full key traversal randomization
2 | DETERMINISTIC | Enables repeatable key traversal
| | randomization
Both numeric and string values are accepted, but note that string values are
case sensitive. The default for this setting is "RANDOM" or
1.
- pid %x not a child
- (W exec) A warning peculiar to VMS. Waitpid() was asked to wait for
a process which isn't a subprocess of the current process. While this is
fine from VMS' perspective, it's probably not what you intended.
- 'P' must have an explicit size in unpack
- (F) The unpack format P must have an explicit size, not
"*".
- pop on reference is experimental
- (S experimental::autoderef) "pop" with a scalar argument is
experimental and may change or be removed in a future Perl version. If you
want to take the risk of using this feature, simply disable this warning:
no warnings "experimental::autoderef";
- POSIX class [:%s:] unknown in regex; marked by
<-- HERE in m/%s/
- (F) The class in the character class [: :] syntax is unknown. The
<-- HERE shows whereabouts in the regular expression the problem
was discovered. Note that the POSIX character classes do not have
the "is" prefix the corresponding C interfaces have: in other
words, it's "[[:print:]]", not "isprint". See
perlre.
- 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.
- POSIX syntax [%c %c] belongs inside character classes in regex; marked by
<-- HERE in m/%s/
- (W regexp) The character class constructs [: :], [= =], and [. .] go
inside character classes, the [] are part of the construct, for
example: /[012[:alpha:]345]/. Note that [= =] and [. .] are not currently
implemented; they are simply placeholders for future extensions and will
cause fatal errors. The <-- HERE shows whereabouts in the
regular expression the problem was discovered. See perlre.
- POSIX syntax [. .] is reserved for future extensions in regex; marked by
<-- HERE in m/%s/
- (F) 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: "\[." and ".\]". The <-- HERE
shows whereabouts in the regular expression the problem was discovered.
See perlre.
- POSIX syntax [= =] is reserved for future extensions in regex; marked by
<-- HERE in m/%s/
- (F) 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: "\[=" and "=\]". The <-- HERE
shows whereabouts in the regular expression the problem was discovered.
See perlre.
- 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 different delimiters 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 different
delimiters 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. See
"ioctl" in perlfunc.
- Possible precedence issue with control flow operator
- (W syntax) There is a possible problem with the mixing of a control flow
operator (e.g. "return") and a low-precedence operator like
"or". Consider:
sub { return $a or $b; }
This is parsed as:
sub { (return $a) or $b; }
Which is effectively just:
sub { return $a; }
Either use parentheses or the high-precedence variant of the operator.
Note this may be also triggered for constructs like:
sub { 1 if die; }
- Possible precedence problem on bitwise %c operator
- (W precedence) Your program uses a bitwise logical operator in conjunction
with a numeric comparison operator, like this :
if ($x & $y == 0) { ... }
This expression is actually equivalent to "$x & ($y == 0)",
due to the higher precedence of "==". This is probably not what
you want. (If you really meant to write this, disable the warning, or,
better, put the parentheses explicitly and write "$x & ($y ==
0)").
- Possible unintended interpolation of $\ in regex
- (W ambiguous) You said something like "m/$\/" in a regex. The
regex "m/foo$\s+bar/m" translates to: match the word 'foo', the
output record separator (see "$\" in perlvar) and the letter 's'
(one time or more) followed by the word 'bar'.
If this is what you intended then you can silence the warning by using
"m/${\}/" (for example: "m/foo${\}s+bar/").
If instead you intended to match the word 'foo' at the end of the line
followed by whitespace and the word 'bar' on the next line then you can
use "m/$(?)\/" (for example: "m/foo$(?)\s+bar/").
- Possible unintended interpolation of %s in string
- (W ambiguous) You said something like '@foo' in a double-quoted string but
there was no array @foo in scope at the time. If you wanted a literal
@foo, then write it as \@foo; otherwise find out what happened to the
array you apparently lost track of.
- Postfix dereference is experimental
- (S experimental::postderef) This warning is emitted if you use the
experimental postfix dereference syntax. Simply suppress the warning if
you want to use the feature, but know that in doing so you are taking the
risk of using an experimental feature which may change or be removed in a
future Perl version:
no warnings "experimental::postderef";
use feature "postderef", "postderef_qq";
$ref->$*;
$aref->@*;
$aref->@[@indices];
... etc ...
- 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.
- printf() on closed filehandle %s
- (W closed) The filehandle you're writing to got itself closed sometime
before now. Check your control flow.
- print() on closed filehandle %s
- (W closed) The filehandle you're printing on got itself closed sometime
before now. Check your control flow.
- Process terminated by SIG%s
- (W) This is a standard message issued by OS/2 applications, while *nix
applications die in silence. It is considered a feature of the OS/2 port.
One can easily disable this by appropriate sighandlers, see
"Signals" in perlipc. See also "Process terminated by
SIGTERM/SIGINT" in perlos2.
- Property '%s' is unknown in regex; marked by <-- HERE in
m/%s/
- (F) The named property which you specified via "\p" or
"\P" is not one known to Perl. Perhaps you misspelled the name?
See "Properties accessible through \p{} and \P{}" in
perluniprops for a complete list of available official properties. If it
is a user-defined property it must have been defined by the time the
regular expression is compiled.
- Prototype after '%c' for %s : %s
- (W illegalproto) A character follows % or @ in a prototype. This is
useless, since % and @ gobble the rest of the subroutine arguments.
- Prototype mismatch: %s vs %s
- (S prototype) The subroutine being declared or defined had previously been
declared or defined with a different function prototype.
- Prototype not terminated
- (F) You've omitted the closing parenthesis in a function prototype
definition.
- Prototype '%s' overridden by attribute 'prototype(%s)' in %s
- (W prototype) A prototype was declared in both the parentheses after the
sub name and via the prototype attribute. The prototype in parentheses is
useless, since it will be replaced by the prototype from the attribute
before it's ever used.
- \p{} uses Unicode rules, not locale rules
- (W) You compiled a regular expression that contained a Unicode property
match ("\p" or "\P"), but the regular expression is
also being told to use the run-time locale, not Unicode. Instead, use a
POSIX character class, which should know about the locale's rules. (See
"POSIX Character Classes" in perlrecharclass.)
Even if the run-time locale is ISO 8859-1 (Latin1), which is a subset of
Unicode, some properties will give results that are not valid for that
subset.
Here are a couple of examples to help you see what's going on. If the locale
is ISO 8859-7, the character at code point 0xD7 is the "GREEK CAPITAL
LETTER CHI". But in Unicode that code point means the
"MULTIPLICATION SIGN" instead, and "\p" always uses
the Unicode meaning. That means that "\p{Alpha}" won't match,
but "[[:alpha:]]" should. Only in the Latin1 locale are all the
characters in the same positions as they are in Unicode. But, even here,
some properties give incorrect results. An example is
"\p{Changes_When_Uppercased}" which is true for "LATIN
SMALL LETTER Y WITH DIAERESIS", but since the upper case of that
character is not in Latin1, in that locale it doesn't change when upper
cased.
- push on reference is experimental
- (S experimental::autoderef) "push" with a scalar argument is
experimental and may change or be removed in a future Perl version. If you
want to take the risk of using this feature, simply disable this warning:
no warnings "experimental::autoderef";
- Quantifier follows nothing in regex; marked by
<-- HERE in m/%s/
- (F) You started a regular expression with a quantifier. Backslash it if
you meant it literally. The <-- HERE shows whereabouts in the
regular expression the problem was discovered. See perlre.
- Quantifier in {,} bigger than %d in regex; marked by <-- HERE in
m/%s/
- (F) There is currently a limit to the size of the min and max values of
the {min,max} construct. The <-- HERE shows whereabouts in the
regular expression the problem was discovered. See perlre.
- Quantifier {n,m} with n > m can't match in regex
- Quantifier {n,m} with n > m can't match in regex; marked by
<-- HERE in m/%s/
- (W regexp) Minima should be less than or equal to maxima. If you really
want your regexp to match something 0 times, just put {0}.
- Quantifier unexpected on zero-length expression in regex; marked by <--
HERE in m/%s/
- (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}/".
The <-- HERE shows whereabouts in the regular expression the problem was
discovered.
- Range iterator outside integer range
- (F) One (or both) of the numeric arguments to the range operator
".." are outside the range which can be represented by integers
internally. One possible workaround is to force Perl to use magical string
increment by prepending "0" to your numbers.
- readdir() attempted on invalid dirhandle %s
- (W io) The dirhandle you're reading from is either closed or not really a
dirhandle. Check your control flow.
- readline() on closed filehandle %s
- (W closed) The filehandle you're reading from got itself closed sometime
before now. Check your control flow.
- read() on closed filehandle %s
- (W closed) You tried to read from a closed filehandle.
- read() on unopened filehandle %s
- (W unopened) You tried to read from a filehandle that was never
opened.
- Reallocation too large: %x
- (F) You can't allocate more than 64K on an MS-DOS machine.
- realloc() of freed memory ignored
- (S malloc) An internal routine called realloc() on something that
had already been freed.
- Recompile perl with -DDEBUGGING to use -D switch
- (S 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 call to Perl_load_module in PerlIO_find_layer
- (P) It is currently not permitted to load modules when creating a
filehandle inside an %INC hook. This can happen with "open my $fh,
'<', \$scalar", which implicitly loads PerlIO::scalar. Try loading
PerlIO::scalar explicitly first.
- Recursive inheritance detected in package '%s'
- (F) While calculating the method resolution order (MRO) of a package, Perl
believes it found an infinite loop in the @ISA hierarchy. This is a crude
check that bails out after 100 levels of @ISA depth.
- refcnt_dec: fd %d%s
- refcnt: fd %d%s
- refcnt_inc: fd %d%s
- (P) Perl's I/O implementation failed an internal consistency check. If you
see this message, something is very wrong.
- Reference found where even-sized list expected
- (W misc) You gave a single reference where Perl was expecting a list with
an even number of elements (for assignment to a hash). This usually means
that you used the anon 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 to invalid group 0 in regex; marked by <-- HERE in
m/%s/
- (F) You used "\g0" or similar in a regular expression. You may
refer to capturing parentheses only with strictly positive integers
(normal backreferences) or with strictly negative integers (relative
backreferences). Using 0 does not make sense.
- Reference to nonexistent group in regex; marked by <-- HERE in
m/%s/
- (F) You used something like "\7" in your regular expression, but
there are not at least seven sets of capturing parentheses in the
expression. If you wanted to have the character with ordinal 7 inserted
into the regular expression, prepend zeroes to make it three digits long:
"\007"
The <-- HERE shows whereabouts in the regular expression the problem was
discovered.
- Reference to nonexistent named group in regex; marked by
<-- HERE in m/%s/
- (F) You used something like "\k'NAME'" or
"\k<NAME>" in your regular expression, but there is no
corresponding named capturing parentheses such as "(?'NAME'...)"
or "(?<NAME>...)". Check if the name has been spelled
correctly both in the backreference and the declaration.
The <-- HERE shows whereabouts in the regular expression the problem was
discovered.
- Reference to nonexistent or unclosed group in regex; marked by
<-- HERE in m/%s/
- (F) You used something like "\g{-7}" in your regular expression,
but there are not at least seven sets of closed capturing parentheses in
the expression before where the "\g{-7}" was located.
The <-- HERE shows whereabouts in the regular expression the problem was
discovered.
- regexp memory corruption
- (P) The regular expression engine got confused by what the regular
expression compiler gave it.
- Regexp modifier "/%c" may appear a maximum of twice
- Regexp modifier "%c" may appear a maximum of twice in regex;
marked by <-- HERE in m/%s/
- (F) The regular expression pattern had too many occurrences of the
specified modifier. Remove the extraneous ones.
- Regexp modifier "%c" may not appear after the "-" in
regex; marked by <-- HERE in m/%s/
- (F) Turning off the given modifier has the side effect of turning on
another one. Perl currently doesn't allow this. Reword the regular
expression to use the modifier you want to turn on (and place it before
the minus), instead of the one you want to turn off.
- Regexp modifier "/%c" may not appear twice
- Regexp modifier "%c" may not appear twice in regex; marked by
<-- HERE in m/%s/
- (F) The regular expression pattern had too many occurrences of the
specified modifier. Remove the extraneous ones.
- Regexp modifiers "/%c" and "/%c" are mutually
exclusive
- Regexp modifiers "%c" and "%c" are mutually exclusive
in regex; marked by <-- HERE in m/%s/
- (F) The regular expression pattern had more than one of these mutually
exclusive modifiers. Retain only the modifier that is supposed to be
there.
- Regexp out of space in regex m/%s/
- (P) A "can't happen" error, because safemalloc() should
have caught it earlier.
- Repeated format line will never terminate (~~ and @#)
- (F) Your format contains the ~~ repeat-until-blank sequence and a numeric
field that will never go blank so that the repetition never terminates.
You might use ^# instead. See perlform.
- Replacement list is longer than search list
- (W misc) You have used a replacement list that is longer than the search
list. So the additional elements in the replacement list are
meaningless.
- '%s' resolved to '\o{%s}%d'
- (W misc, regexp) You wrote something like "\08", or
"\179" in a double-quotish string. All but the last digit is
treated as a single character, specified in octal. The last digit is the
next character in the string. To tell Perl that this is indeed what you
want, you can use the "\o{ }" syntax, or use exactly three
digits to specify the octal for the character.
- Reversed %s= operator
- (W syntax) You wrote your assignment operator backwards. The = must always
come last, to avoid ambiguity with subsequent unary operators.
- rewinddir() attempted on invalid dirhandle %s
- (W io) The dirhandle you tried to do a rewinddir() on is either
closed or not really a dirhandle. Check your control flow.
- Scalars leaked: %d
- (S internal) Something went wrong in Perl's internal bookkeeping of
scalars: not all scalar variables were deallocated by the time Perl
exited. What this usually indicates is a memory leak, which is of course
bad, especially if the Perl program is intended to be long-running.
- 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. See perlref.
- 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 $foo{&bar} always behaves
like a scalar, both when assigning to it and when evaluating its argument,
while @foo{&bar} behaves like a list when you assign to it, and
provides a list context to its subscript, which can do weird things if
you're expecting only one subscript.
On the other hand, if you were actually hoping to treat the hash element as
a list, you need to look into how references work, because Perl will not
magically convert between scalars and lists for you. See perlref.
- Search pattern not terminated
- (F) The lexer couldn't find the final delimiter of a // or m{} construct.
Remember that bracketing delimiters count nesting level. Missing the
leading "$" from a variable $m may cause this error.
Note that since Perl 5.10.0 a // can also be the defined-or
construct, not just the empty search pattern. Therefore code written in
Perl 5.10.0 or later that uses the // as the defined-or can be
misparsed by pre-5.10.0 Perls as a non-terminated search pattern.
- Search pattern not terminated or ternary operator parsed as search
pattern
- (F) The lexer couldn't find the final delimiter of a "?PATTERN?"
construct.
The question mark is also used as part of the ternary operator (as in
"foo ? 0 : 1") leading to some ambiguous constructions being
wrongly parsed. One way to disambiguate the parsing is to put parentheses
around the conditional expression, i.e. "(foo) ? 0 : 1".
- seekdir() attempted on invalid dirhandle %s
- (W io) The dirhandle you are doing a seekdir() on is either closed
or not really a dirhandle. Check your control flow.
- %sseek() on unopened filehandle
- (W unopened) You tried to use the seek() or sysseek()
function on a filehandle that was either never opened or has since been
closed.
- select not implemented
- (F) This machine doesn't implement the select() system call.
- Self-ties of arrays and hashes are not supported
- (F) Self-ties are of arrays and hashes are not supported in the current
implementation.
- 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.
- 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.
- sem%s not implemented
- (F) You don't have System V semaphore IPC on your system.
- send() on closed socket %s
- (W closed) The socket you're sending to got itself closed sometime before
now. Check your control flow.
- Sequence (? incomplete in regex; marked by <-- HERE in
m/%s/
- (F) A regular expression ended with an incomplete extension (?. The
<-- HERE shows whereabouts in the regular expression the problem
was discovered. See perlre.
- Sequence (?%c...) not implemented in regex; marked by <-- HERE
in m/%s/
- (F) A proposed regular expression extension has the character reserved but
has not yet been written. The <-- HERE shows whereabouts in the
regular expression the problem was discovered. See perlre.
- Sequence (?%s...) not recognized in regex; marked by <-- HERE in
m/%s/
- (F) You used a regular expression extension that doesn't make sense. The
<-- HERE shows whereabouts in the regular expression the problem
was discovered. This may happen when using the "(?^...)"
construct to tell Perl to use the default regular expression modifiers,
and you redundantly specify a default modifier. For other causes, see
perlre.
- Sequence (?#... not terminated in regex m/%s/
- (F) A regular expression comment must be terminated by a closing
parenthesis. Embedded parentheses aren't allowed. See perlre.
- Sequence (?&... not terminated in regex; marked by <-- HERE
in m/%s/
- (F) A named reference of the form "(?&...)" was missing the
final closing parenthesis after the name. The <-- HERE shows
whereabouts in the regular expression the problem was discovered.
- Sequence (?%c... not terminated in regex; marked by <-- HERE in
m/%s/
- (F) A named group of the form "(?'...')" or
"(?<...>)" was missing the final closing quote or angle
bracket. The <-- HERE shows whereabouts in the regular
expression the problem was discovered.
- Sequence (?(%c... not terminated in regex; marked by <-- HERE in
m/%s/
- (F) A named reference of the form "(?('...')...)" or
"(?(<...>)...)" was missing the final closing quote or
angle bracket after the name. The <-- HERE shows whereabouts in
the regular expression the problem was discovered.
- Sequence \%s... not terminated in regex; marked by <-- HERE in
m/%s/
- (F) The regular expression expects a mandatory argument following the
escape sequence and this has been omitted or incorrectly written.
- Sequence (?{...}) not terminated with ')'
- (F) The end of the perl code contained within the {...} must be followed
immediately by a ')'.
- Sequence ?P=... not terminated in regex; marked by <-- HERE in
m/%s/
- (F) A named reference of the form "(?P=...)" was missing the
final closing parenthesis after the name. The <-- HERE shows
whereabouts in the regular expression the problem was discovered.
- Sequence (?R) not terminated in regex m/%s/
- (F) An "(?R)" or "(?0)" sequence in a regular
expression was missing the final parenthesis.
- Server error (a.k.a. "500 Server error")
- (A) This is the error message generally seen in a browser window when
trying 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:
http://www.perl.org/CGI_MetaFAQ.html
http://www.htmlhelp.org/faq/cgifaq.html
http://www.w3.org/Security/Faq/
You should also look at perlfaq9.
- setegid() not implemented
- (F) You tried to assign to $), and 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 $>, and 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 $(, and 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 $<, and 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? See
"setsockopt" in perlfunc.
- Setting $/ to a reference to %s as a form of slurp is deprecated, treating
as undef
- (W deprecated) You assigned a reference to a scalar to $/ where the
referenced item is not a positive integer. In older perls this
appeared to work the same as setting it to "undef" but
was in fact internally different, less efficient and with very bad luck
could have resulted in your file being split by a stringified form of the
reference.
In Perl 5.20.0 this was changed so that it would be exactly the same
as setting $/ to undef, with the exception that this warning would be
thrown.
You are recommended to change your code to set $/ to "undef"
explicitly if you wish to slurp the file. In future versions of Perl
assigning a reference to will throw a fatal error.
- Setting $/ to %s reference is forbidden
- (F) You tried to assign a reference to a non integer to $/. In older Perls
this would have behaved similarly to setting it to a reference to a
positive integer, where the integer was the address of the reference. As
of Perl 5.20.0 this is a fatal error, to allow future versions of Perl to
use non-integer refs for more interesting purposes.
- shift on reference is experimental
- (S experimental::autoderef) "shift" with a scalar argument is
experimental and may change or be removed in a future Perl version. If you
want to take the risk of using this feature, simply disable this warning:
no warnings "experimental::autoderef";
- shm%s not implemented
- (F) You don't have System V shared memory IPC on your system.
- !=~ should be !~
- (W syntax) The non-matching operator is !~, not !=~. !=~ will be
interpreted as the != (numeric not equal) and ~ (1's complement)
operators: probably not what you intended.
- <> should be quotes
- (F) You wrote "require <file>" when you should have
written "require 'file'".
- /%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.
- 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?
- Slab leaked from cv %p
- (S) If you see this message, then something is seriously wrong with the
internal bookkeeping of op trees. An op tree needed to be freed after a
compilation error, but could not be found, so it was leaked instead.
- sleep(%u) too large
- (W overflow) You called "sleep" with a number that was larger
than it can reliably handle and "sleep" probably slept for less
time than requested.
- Slurpy parameter not last
- (F) In a subroutine signature, you put something after a slurpy (array or
hash) parameter. The slurpy parameter takes all the available arguments,
so there can't be any left to fill later parameters.
- Smart matching a non-overloaded object breaks encapsulation
- (F) You should not use the "~~" operator on an object that does
not overload it: Perl refuses to use the object's underlying structure for
the smart match.
- Smartmatch is experimental
- (S experimental::smartmatch) This warning is emitted if you use the
smartmatch ("~~") operator. This is currently an experimental
feature, and its details are subject to change in future releases of Perl.
Particularly, its current behavior is noticed for being unnecessarily
complex and unintuitive, and is very likely to be overhauled.
- 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 single value
- (F) A sort comparison subroutine written in XS must return exactly one
item. See "sort" in perlfunc.
- Source filters apply only to byte streams
- (F) You tried to activate a source filter (usually by loading a source
filter module) within a string passed to "eval". This is not
permitted under the "unicode_eval" feature. Consider using
"evalbytes" instead. See feature.
- splice() offset past end of array
- (W misc) You attempted to specify an offset that was past the end of the
array passed to splice(). Splicing will instead commence at the end
of the array, rather than past it. If this isn't what you want, try
explicitly pre-extending the array by assigning $#array = $offset. See
"splice" in perlfunc.
- splice on reference is experimental
- (S experimental::autoderef) "splice" with a scalar argument is
experimental and may change or be removed in a future Perl version. If you
want to take the risk of using this feature, simply disable this warning:
no warnings "experimental::autoderef";
- 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.) See "split" in perlfunc.
- 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.
- "state %s" used in sort comparison
- (W syntax) The package variables $a and $b are used for sort comparisons.
You used $a or $b in as an operand to the "<=>" or
"cmp" operator inside a sort comparison block, 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.
- "state" 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 on the front. Use
local() if you want to localize a package variable.
- stat() on unopened filehandle %s
- (W unopened) You tried to use the stat() function on a filehandle
that was either never opened or has since been closed.
- Strings with code points over 0xFF may not be mapped into in-memory file
handles
- (W utf8) You tried to open a reference to a scalar for read or append
where the scalar contained code points over 0xFF. In-memory files model
on-disk files and can only contain bytes.
- 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" is not available
- (W closure) During compilation, an inner named subroutine or eval is
attempting to capture an outer lexical subroutine that is not currently
available. This can happen for one of two reasons. First, the lexical
subroutine may be declared in an outer anonymous subroutine that has not
yet been created. (Remember that named subs are created at compile time,
while anonymous subs are created at run-time.) For example,
sub { my sub a {...} sub f { \&a } }
At the time that f is created, it can't capture the current "a"
sub, since the anonymous subroutine hasn't been created yet. Conversely,
the following won't give a warning since the anonymous subroutine has by
now been created and is live:
sub { my sub a {...} eval 'sub f { \&a }' }->();
The second situation is caused by an eval accessing a lexical subroutine
that has gone out of scope, for example,
sub f {
my sub a {...}
sub { eval '\&a' }
}
f()->();
Here, when the '\&a' in the eval is being compiled, f() is not currently
being executed, so its &a is not available for capture.
- "%s" subroutine &%s masks earlier declaration in same
%s
- (W misc) A "my" or "state" subroutine 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 subroutine will still exist until the end of
the scope or until all closure references to it are destroyed.
- Subroutine %s redefined
- (W redefine) You redefined a subroutine. To suppress this warning, say
{
no warnings 'redefine';
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.) See the discussion of substitution in "Regexp
Quote-Like Operators" in perlop.
- 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 level.
Missing the leading "$" from variable $s may cause this
error.
- Substitution replacement not terminated
- (F) The lexer couldn't find the final delimiter of an s/// or s{}{}
construct. Remember that bracketing delimiters count nesting level.
Missing the leading "$" 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. See "substr" in perlfunc. This
warning is fatal if substr is used in an lvalue context (as the left hand
side of an assignment or as a subroutine argument for example).
- sv_upgrade from type %d down to type %d
- (P) Perl tried to force the upgrade of an SV to a type which was actually
inferior to its current type.
- SWASHNEW didn't return an HV ref
- (P) Something went wrong internally when Perl was trying to look up
Unicode characters.
- Switch (?(condition)... contains too many branches in regex; marked by
<-- HERE in m/%s/
- (F) A (?(condition)if-clause|else-clause) construct can have at most two
branches (the if-clause and the else-clause). If you want one or both to
contain alternation, such as using "this|that|other", enclose it
in clustering parentheses:
(?(condition)(?:this|that|other)|else-clause)
The <-- HERE shows whereabouts in the regular expression the
problem was discovered. See perlre.
- Switch condition not recognized in regex; marked by <-- HERE in
m/%s/
- (F) The condition part of a (?(condition)if-clause|else-clause) construct
is not known. The condition must be one of the following:
(1) (2) ... true if 1st, 2nd, etc., capture matched
(<NAME>) ('NAME') true if named capture matched
(?=...) (?<=...) true if subpattern matches
(?!...) (?<!...) true if subpattern fails to match
(?{ CODE }) true if code returns a true value
(R) true if evaluating inside recursion
(R1) (R2) ... true if directly inside capture group 1, 2, etc.
(R&NAME) true if directly inside named capture
(DEFINE) always false; for defining named subpatterns
The <-- HERE shows whereabouts in the regular expression the problem was
discovered. See perlre.
- 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) 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 there will be another error message associated with the syntax error
giving more information. (Sometimes it helps to turn on -w.) The
error message itself often tells you where it was in the line when it
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
went 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.
- syntax error in file %s at line %d, next 2 tokens "%s"
- (F) This error is likely to occur if you run a perl5 script through a
perl4 interpreter, especially if the next 2 tokens are "use
strict" or "my $var" or "our $var".
- Syntax error in (?[...]) in regex m/%s/
- (F) Perl could not figure out what you meant inside this construct; this
notifies you that it is giving up trying.
- %s syntax OK
- (F) The final summary message when a "perl -c" succeeds.
- sysread() on closed filehandle %s
- (W closed) You tried to read from a closed filehandle.
- sysread() on unopened filehandle %s
- (W unopened) You tried to read from a filehandle that was never
opened.
- 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 that System V IPC
is not implemented in your machine. In some machines the functionality can
exist but be unconfigured. Consult your system support.
- syswrite() on closed filehandle %s
- (W closed) The filehandle you're writing to got itself closed sometime
before now. Check your control flow.
- "-T" and "-B" not implemented on filehandles
- (F) Perl can't peek at the stdio buffer of filehandles when it doesn't
know about your kind of stdio. You'll have to use a filename instead.
- 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.
- telldir() attempted on invalid dirhandle %s
- (W io) The dirhandle you tried to telldir() is either closed or not
really a dirhandle. Check your control flow.
- tell() on unopened filehandle
- (W unopened) You tried to use the tell() function on a filehandle
that was either never opened or has since been closed.
- 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 $[ = 1;
...
This is to prevent the problem of one module changing the array base out
from under another module inadvertently. See "$[" in perlvar and
arybase.
- 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 that they will
continue to pretend that it is. And if you quote me on that, I will deny
it.
- The %s function is unimplemented
- (F) The function indicated isn't implemented on this architecture,
according to the probings of Configure.
- The lexical_subs feature is experimental
- (S experimental::lexical_subs) This warning is emitted if you declare a
sub with "my" or "state". Simply suppress the warning
if you want to use the feature, but know that in doing so you are taking
the risk of using an experimental feature which may change or be removed
in a future Perl version:
no warnings "experimental::lexical_subs";
use feature "lexical_subs";
my sub foo { ... }
- The regex_sets feature is experimental
- (S experimental::regex_sets) This warning is emitted if you use the syntax
"(?[ ])" in a regular expression. The
details of this feature are subject to change. if you want to use it, but
know that in doing so you are taking the risk of using an experimental
feature which may change in a future Perl version, you can do this to
silence the warning:
no warnings "experimental::regex_sets";
- The signatures feature is experimental
- (S experimental::signatures) This warning is emitted if you unwrap a
subroutine's arguments using a signature. Simply suppress the warning if
you want to use the feature, but know that in doing so you are taking the
risk of using an experimental feature which may change or be removed in a
future Perl version:
no warnings "experimental::signatures";
use feature "signatures";
sub foo ($left, $right) { ... }
- The stat preceding %s 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.
- The 'unique' attribute may only be applied to 'our' variables
- (F) This attribute was never supported on "my" or
"sub" declarations.
- This Perl can't reset CRTL environ elements (%s)
- This Perl can't set CRTL environ elements (%s=%s)
- (W internal) 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 setenv() function. You'll need
to rebuild Perl with a CRTL that does, or redefine PERL_ENV_TABLES
(see perlvms) so that the environ array isn't the target of the change to
%ENV which produced the warning.
- This Perl has not been built with support for randomized hash key
traversal but something called Perl_hv_rand_set().
- (F) Something has attempted to use an internal API call which depends on
Perl being compiled with the default support for randomized hash key
traversal, but this Perl has been compiled without it. You should report
this warning to the relevant upstream party, or recompile perl with
default options.
- times not implemented
- (F) Your version of the C library apparently doesn't do times(). I
suspect you're not running on Unix.
- "-T" is on the #! line, it must also be used on the command
line
- (X) The #! line (or local equivalent) in a Perl script contains the
-T option (or 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 -%c option is a part of Perl's first argument:
e.g. change "perl -n -%c" to "perl -%c -n".
If the Perl script is being executed as "perl scriptname", then
the -%c option must appear on the command line: "perl -%c
scriptname".
- To%s: illegal mapping '%s'
- (F) You tried to define a customized To-mapping for lc(), lcfirst,
uc(), or ucfirst() (or their string-inlined versions), but
you specified an illegal mapping. See "User-Defined Character
Properties" in perlunicode.
- Too deeply nested ()-groups
- (F) Your template contains ()-groups with a ridiculously deep nesting
level.
- 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 few arguments for subroutine
- (F) A subroutine using a signature received fewer arguments than required
by the signature. The caller of the subroutine is presumably at fault.
Inconveniently, this error will be reported at the location of the
subroutine, not that of the caller.
- Too late for "-%s" option
- (X) The #! line (or local equivalent) in a Perl script contains the
-M, -m or -C option.
In the case of -M and -m, this is an error because those
options are not intended for use inside scripts. Use the "use"
pragma instead.
The -C option only works if it is specified on the command line as
well (with the same sequence of letters or numbers following). Either
specify this option on the command line, or, if your system supports it,
make your script executable and run it directly instead of passing it to
perl.
- 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 args to syscall
- (F) Perl supports a maximum of only 14 args to syscall().
- Too many arguments for %s
- (F) The function requires fewer arguments than you specified.
- Too many arguments for subroutine
- (F) A subroutine using a signature received more arguments than required
by the signature. The caller of the subroutine is presumably at fault.
Inconveniently, this error will be reported at the location of the
subroutine, not that of the caller.
- 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 ('s
- (A) You've accidentally run your script through csh instead of
Perl. Check the #! line, or manually feed your script into Perl
yourself.
- Trailing \ in regex m/%s/
- (F) The regular expression ends with an unbackslashed backslash. Backslash
it. See perlre.
- Trailing white-space in a charnames alias definition is deprecated
- (D deprecated) You defined a character name which ended in a space
character. Remove the trailing space(s). Usually these names are defined
in the ":alias" import argument to "use charnames",
but they could be defined by a translator installed into $^H{charnames}.
See "CUSTOM ALIASES" in charnames.
- Transliteration pattern not terminated
- (F) The lexer couldn't find the interior delimiter of a tr/// or tr[][] or
y/// or y[][] construct. Missing the leading "$" 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///, tr[][], y///
or y[][] construct.
- '%s' trapped by operation mask
- (F) You tried to use an operator from a Safe compartment in which it's
disallowed. See Safe.
- truncate not implemented
- (F) Your machine doesn't implement a file truncation mechanism that
Configure knows about.
- Type of arg %d to &CORE::%s must be %s
- (F) The subroutine in question in the CORE package requires its argument
to be a hard reference to data of the specified type. Overloading is
ignored, so a reference to an object that is not the specified type, but
nonetheless has overloading to handle it, will still not be accepted.
- 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} forms as an explicit dereference. See perlref.
- Type of argument to %s must be unblessed hashref or arrayref
- (F) You called "keys", "values" or "each"
with a scalar argument that was not a reference to an unblessed hash or
array.
- 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).
- Unbalanced context: %d more PUSHes than POPs
- (S internal) The exit code detected an internal inconsistency in how many
execution contexts were entered and left.
- Unbalanced saves: %d more saves than restores
- (S internal) The exit code detected an internal inconsistency in how many
values were temporarily localized.
- Unbalanced scopes: %d more ENTERs than LEAVEs
- (S internal) The exit code detected an internal inconsistency in how many
blocks were entered and left.
- Unbalanced string table refcount: (%d) for "%s"
- (S internal) On exit, Perl found some strings remaining in the shared
string table used for copy on write and for hash keys. The entries should
have been freed, so this indicates a bug somewhere.
- Unbalanced tmps: %d more allocs than frees
- (S 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? See perlform.
- Undefined sort subroutine "%s" called
- (F) The sort comparison routine specified doesn't seem to exist. Perhaps
it's in a different package? See "sort" in perlfunc.
- 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. See "sort" in perlfunc.
- Undefined top format "%s" called
- (F) The format indicated doesn't seem to exist. Perhaps it's really in
another package? See perlform.
- Undefined value assigned to typeglob
- (W misc) An undefined value was assigned to a typeglob, a la "*foo =
undef". This does nothing. It's possible that you really mean
"undef *foo".
- %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.
- 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.
- Unexpected binary operator '%c' with no preceding operand in regex; marked
by <-- HERE in m/%s/
- (F) You had something like this:
(?[ | \p{Digit} ])
where the "|" is a binary operator with an operand on the right,
but no operand on the left.
- Unexpected character in regex; marked by <-- HERE in m/%s/
- (F) You had something like this:
(?[ z ])
Within "(?[ ])", no literal characters are allowed unless they are
within an inner pair of square brackets, like
(?[ [ z ] ])
Another possibility is that you forgot a backslash. Perl isn't smart enough
to figure out what you really meant.
- Unexpected constant lvalue entersub entry via type/targ %d:%d
- (P) When compiling a subroutine call in lvalue context, Perl failed an
internal consistency check. It encountered a malformed op tree.
- Unexpected exit %u
- (S) exit() was called or the script otherwise finished gracefully
when "PERL_EXIT_WARN" was set in "PL_exit_flags".
- Unexpected exit failure %d
- (S) An uncaught die() was called when "PERL_EXIT_WARN"
was set in "PL_exit_flags".
- Unexpected ')' in regex; marked by <-- HERE in m/%s/
- (F) You had something like this:
(?[ ( \p{Digit} + ) ])
The ")" is out-of-place. Something apparently was supposed to be
combined with the digits, or the "+" shouldn't be there, or
something like that. Perl can't figure out what was intended.
- Unexpected '(' with no preceding operator in regex; marked by
<-- HERE in m/%s/
- (F) You had something like this:
(?[ \p{Digit} ( \p{Lao} + \p{Thai} ) ])
There should be an operator before the "(", as there's no
indication as to how the digits are to be combined with the characters in
the Lao and Thai scripts.
- Unicode non-character U+%X is illegal for open interchange
- (S nonchar) Certain codepoints, such as U+FFFE and U+FFFF, are defined by
the Unicode standard to be non-characters. Those are legal codepoints, but
are reserved for internal use; so, applications shouldn't attempt to
exchange them. An application may not be expecting any of these characters
at all, and receiving them may lead to bugs. If you know what you are
doing you can turn off this warning by "no warnings 'nonchar';".
This is not really a "serious" error, but it is supposed to be
raised by default even if warnings are not enabled, and currently the only
way to do that in Perl is to mark it as serious.
- Unicode surrogate U+%X is illegal in UTF-8
- (S surrogate) You had a UTF-16 surrogate in a context where they are not
considered acceptable. These code points, between U+D800 and U+DFFF
(inclusive), are used by Unicode only for UTF-16. However, Perl internally
allows all unsigned integer code points (up to the size limit available on
your platform), including surrogates. But these can cause problems when
being input or output, which is likely where this message came from. If
you really really know what you are doing you can turn off this warning by
"no warnings 'surrogate';".
- Unknown charname '%s'
- (F) The name you used inside "\N{}" is unknown to Perl. Check
the spelling. You can say "use charnames ":loose"" to
not have to be so precise about spaces, hyphens, and capitalization on
standard Unicode names. (Any custom aliases that have been created must be
specified exactly, regardless of whether ":loose" is used or
not.) This error may also happen if the "\N{}" is not in the
scope of the corresponding "use charnames".
- Unknown error
- (P) Perl was about to print an error message in $@, but the $@ variable
did not exist, even after an attempt to create it.
- Unknown open() mode '%s'
- (F) The second argument of 3-argument open() is not among the list
of valid modes: "<", ">", ">>",
"+<", "+>", "+>>",
"-|", "|-", "<&",
">&".
- Unknown PerlIO layer "%s"
- (W layer) An attempt was made to push an unknown layer onto the Perl I/O
system. (Layers take care of transforming data between external and
internal representations.) Note that some layers, such as
"mmap", are not supported in all environments. If your program
didn't explicitly request the failing operation, it may be the result of
the value of the environment variable PERLIO.
- Unknown process %x sent message to prime_env_iter: %s
- (P) An error peculiar to VMS. Perl was reading values for %ENV before
iterating over it, and someone else stuck a message in the stream of data
Perl expected. Someone's very confused, or perhaps trying to subvert
Perl's population of %ENV for nefarious purposes.
- Unknown regex modifier "%s"
- (F) Alphanumerics immediately following the closing delimiter of a regular
expression pattern are interpreted by Perl as modifier flags for the
regex. One of the ones you specified is invalid. One way this can happen
is if you didn't put in white space between the end of the regex and a
following alphanumeric operator:
if ($a =~ /foo/and $bar == 3) { ... }
The "a" is a valid modifier flag, but the "n" is not,
and raises this error. Likely what was meant instead was:
if ($a =~ /foo/ and $bar == 3) { ... }
- Unknown "re" subpragma '%s' (known ones are: %s)
- (W) You tried to use an unknown subpragma of the "re"
pragma.
- Unknown switch condition (?(...)) in regex; marked by <-- HERE
in m/%s/
- (F) The condition part of a (?(condition)if-clause|else-clause) construct
is not known. The condition must be one of the following:
(1) (2) ... true if 1st, 2nd, etc., capture matched
(<NAME>) ('NAME') true if named capture matched
(?=...) (?<=...) true if subpattern matches
(?!...) (?<!...) true if subpattern fails to match
(?{ CODE }) true if code returns a true value
(R) true if evaluating inside recursion
(R1) (R2) ... true if directly inside capture group 1, 2, etc.
(R&NAME) true if directly inside named capture
(DEFINE) always false; for defining named subpatterns
The <-- HERE shows whereabouts in the regular expression the problem was
discovered. See perlre.
- Unknown Unicode option letter '%c'
- (F) You specified an unknown Unicode option. See perlrun documentation of
the "-C" switch for the list of known options.
- Unknown Unicode option value %d
- (F) You specified an unknown Unicode option. See perlrun documentation of
the "-C" switch for the list of known options.
- Unknown verb pattern '%s' in regex; marked by <-- HERE in
m/%s/
- (F) You either made a typo or have incorrectly put a "*"
quantifier after an open brace in your pattern. Check the pattern and
review perlre for details on legal verb patterns.
- Unknown warnings category '%s'
- (F) An error issued by the "warnings" pragma. You specified a
warnings category that is unknown to perl at this point.
Note that if you want to enable a warnings category registered by a module
(e.g. "use warnings 'File::Find'"), you must have loaded this
module first.
- Unmatched '[' in POSIX class in regex; marked by <-- HERE in
m/%s/
- (F) You had something like this:
(?[ [:digit: ])
That should be written:
(?[ [:digit:] ])
- Unmatched '%c' in POSIX class in regex; marked by <-- HERE in
m/%s/
- (F) You had something like this:
(?[ [:alnum] ])
There should be a second ":", like this:
(?[ [:alnum:] ])
- Unmatched [ in regex; marked by <-- HERE in m/%s/
- (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. The <-- HERE shows whereabouts in the regular expression
the problem was discovered. See perlre.
- Unmatched ( in regex; marked by <-- HERE in m/%s/
- Unmatched ) in regex; marked by <-- HERE in m/%s/
- (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. The <-- HERE shows whereabouts in the
regular expression the problem was discovered. See perlre.
- 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.
- 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; marked by <-- HERE after %s near
column %d
- (F) The Perl parser has no idea what to do with the specified character in
your Perl script (or eval) near the specified column. Perhaps you tried to
run a compressed script, a binary program, or a directory as a Perl
program.
- Unrecognized escape \%c in character class in regex; marked by
<-- HERE in m/%s/
- (F) You used a backslash-character combination which is not recognized by
Perl inside character classes. This is a fatal error when the character
class is used within "(?[ ])".
- Unrecognized escape \%c in character class passed through in regex; marked
by <-- HERE in m/%s/
- (W regexp) You used a backslash-character combination which is not
recognized by Perl inside character classes. The character was understood
literally, but this may change in a future version of Perl. The
<-- HERE shows whereabouts in the regular expression the escape
was discovered.
- Unrecognized escape \%c passed through
- (W misc) You used a backslash-character combination which is not
recognized by Perl. The character was understood literally, but this may
change in a future version of Perl.
- Unrecognized escape \%s passed through in regex; marked by
<-- HERE in m/%s/
- (W regexp) You used a backslash-character combination which is not
recognized by Perl. The character(s) were understood literally, but this
may change in a future version of Perl. The <-- HERE shows
whereabouts in the regular expression the escape was discovered.
- 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.)
- unshift on reference is experimental
- (S experimental::autoderef) "unshift" with a scalar argument is
experimental and may change or be removed in a future Perl version. If you
want to take the risk of using this feature, simply disable this warning:
no warnings "experimental::autoderef";
- 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 chomp() it off. See
"chomp" in perlfunc.
- Unsupported directory function "%s" called
- (F) Your machine doesn't support opendir() and
readdir().
- Unsupported function %s
- (F) This machine doesn't implement the indicated function, apparently. At
least, Configure doesn't think so.
- 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 script encoding %s
- (F) Your program file begins with a Unicode Byte Order Mark (BOM) which
declares it to be in a Unicode encoding that Perl cannot read.
- Unsupported socket function "%s" called
- (F) Your machine doesn't support the Berkeley socket mechanism, or at
least that's what Configure thought.
- 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. See attributes.
- 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. See attributes.
- Unterminated compressed integer
- (F) An argument to unpack("w",...) was incompatible with the BER
compressed integer format and could not be converted to an integer. See
"pack" in perlfunc.
- Unterminated delimiter for here document
- (F) This message occurs when a here document label has an initial
quotation mark but the final quotation mark is missing. Perhaps you wrote:
<<"foo
instead of:
<<"foo"
- Unterminated \g... pattern in regex; marked by <-- HERE in
m/%s/
- Unterminated \g{...} pattern in regex; marked by <-- HERE in
m/%s/
- (F) In a regular expression, you had a "\g" that wasn't followed
by a proper group reference. In the case of "\g{", the closing
brace is missing; otherwise the "\g" must be followed by an
integer. Fix the pattern and retry.
- 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 "less than".
- Unterminated verb pattern argument in regex; marked by <-- HERE
in m/%s/
- (F) You used a pattern of the form "(*VERB:ARG)" but did not
terminate the pattern with a ")". Fix the pattern and
retry.
- Unterminated verb pattern in regex; marked by <-- HERE in
m/%s/
- (F) You used a pattern of the form "(*VERB)" but did not
terminate the pattern with a ")". Fix the pattern and
retry.
- 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.
- Usage: POSIX::%s(%s)
- (F) You called a POSIX function with incorrect arguments. See
"FUNCTIONS" in POSIX for more information.
- Usage: Win32::%s(%s)
- (F) You called a Win32 function with incorrect arguments. See Win32 for
more information.
- $[ used in %s (did you mean $] ?)
- (W syntax) You used $[ in a comparison, such as:
if ($[ > 5.006) {
...
}
You probably meant to use $] instead. $[ is the base for indexing arrays. $]
is the Perl version number in decimal.
- Use "%s" instead of "%s"
- (F) The second listed construct is no longer legal. Use the first one
instead.
- Useless assignment to a temporary
- (W misc) You assigned to an lvalue subroutine, but what the subroutine
returned was a temporary scalar about to be discarded, so the assignment
had no effect.
- Useless (?-%s) - don't use /%s modifier in regex; marked by
<-- HERE in m/%s/
- (W regexp) You have used an internal modifier such as (?-o) that has no
meaning unless removed from the entire regexp:
if ($string =~ /(?-o)$pattern/o) { ... }
must be written as
if ($string =~ /$pattern/) { ... }
The <-- HERE shows whereabouts in the regular expression the problem was
discovered. See perlre.
- Useless localization of %s
- (W syntax) The localization of lvalues such as "local($x=10)" is
legal, but in fact the local() currently has no effect. This may
change at some point in the future, but in the meantime such code is
discouraged.
- Useless (?%s) - use /%s modifier in regex; marked by <-- HERE in
m/%s/
- (W regexp) You have used an internal modifier such as (?o) that has no
meaning unless applied to the entire regexp:
if ($string =~ /(?o)$pattern/) { ... }
must be written as
if ($string =~ /$pattern/o) { ... }
The <-- HERE shows whereabouts in the regular expression the problem was
discovered. See perlre.
- Useless use of /d modifier in transliteration operator
- (W misc) You have used the /d modifier where the searchlist has the same
length as the replacelist. See perlop for more information about the /d
modifier.
- Useless use of '\'; doesn't escape metacharacter '%c'
- (D deprecated) You wrote a regular expression pattern something like one
of these:
m{ \x\{FF\} }x
m{foo\{1,3\}}
qr(foo\(bar\))
s[foo\[a-z\]bar][baz]
The interior braces, square brackets, and parentheses are treated as
metacharacters even though they are backslashed; instead write:
m{ \x{FF} }x
m{foo{1,3}}
qr(foo(bar))
s[foo[a-z]bar][baz]
The backslashes have no effect when a regular expression pattern is
delimited by "{}", "[]", or "()", which
ordinarily are metacharacters, and the delimiters are also used, paired,
within the interior of the pattern. It is planned that a future Perl
release will change the meaning of constructs like these so that the
backslashes will have an effect, so remove them from your code.
- Useless use of \E
- (W misc) You have a \E in a double-quotish string without a
"\U", "\L" or "\Q" preceding it.
- Useless use of greediness modifier '%c' in regex; marked by
<-- HERE in m/%s/
- (W regexp) You specified something like these:
qr/a{3}?/
qr/b{1,1}+/
The "?" and "+" don't have any effect, as they modify
whether to match more or fewer when there is a choice, and by specifying
to match exactly a given numer, there is no room left for a choice.
- 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. Very
often this points not to stupidity on your part, but a failure of Perl to
parse your program the way you thought it would. 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 to use 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. See perlref for more on
this.
This warning will not be issued for numerical constants equal to 0 or 1
since they are often used in statements like
1 while sub_with_side_effects();
String constants that would normally evaluate to 0 or 1 are warned
about.
- Useless use of (?-p) in regex; marked by <-- HERE in m/%s/
- (W regexp) The "p" modifier cannot be turned off once set.
Trying to do so is futile.
- Useless use of "re" pragma
- (W) You did "use re;" without any arguments. That isn't very
useful.
- Useless use of sort in scalar context
- (W void) You used sort in scalar context, as in :
my $x = sort @y;
This is not very useful, and perl currently optimizes this away.
- Useless use of %s with no values
- (W syntax) You used the push() or unshift() function with no
arguments apart from the array, like "push(@x)" or
"unshift(@foo)". That won't usually have any effect on the
array, so is completely useless. It's possible in principle that
push(@tied_array) could have some effect if the array is tied to a class
which implements a PUSH method. If so, you can write it as
"push(@tied_array,())" to avoid this warning.
- "use" not allowed in expression
- (F) The "use" keyword is recognized and executed at compile
time, and returns no useful value. See perlmod.
- Use of assignment to $[ is deprecated
- (D deprecated) The $[ variable (index of the first element in an array) is
deprecated. See "$[" in perlvar.
- 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 chdir('') or chdir(undef) as chdir() deprecated
- (D deprecated) chdir() with no arguments is documented to change to
$ENV{HOME} or $ENV{LOGDIR}. chdir(undef) and chdir('') share this
behavior, but that has been deprecated. In future versions they will
simply fail.
Be careful to check that what you pass to chdir() is defined and not
blank, else you might find yourself in your home directory.
- Use of /c modifier is meaningless in s///
- (W regexp) You used the /c modifier in a substitution. The /c modifier is
not presently meaningful in substitutions.
- Use of /c modifier is meaningless without /g
- (W regexp) You used the /c modifier with a regex operand, but didn't use
the /g modifier. Currently, /c is meaningful only when /g is used. (This
may change in the future.)
- Use of comma-less variable list is deprecated
- (D deprecated) The values you give to a format should be separated by
commas, not just aligned on a line.
- Use of each() on hash after insertion without resetting hash
iterator results in undefined behavior
- (S internal) The behavior of "each()" after insertion is
undefined; it may skip items, or visit items more than once. Consider
using "keys()" instead of "each()".
- Use of := for an empty attribute list is not allowed
- (F) The construction "my $x := 42" used to parse as equivalent
to "my $x : = 42" (applying an empty attribute list to $x). This
construct was deprecated in 5.12.0, and has now been made a syntax error,
so ":=" can be reclaimed as a new operator in the future.
If you need an empty attribute list, for example in a code generator, add a
space before the "=".
- Use of freed value in iteration
- (F) Perhaps you modified the iterated array within the loop? This error is
typically caused by code like the following:
@a = (3,4);
@a = () for (1,2,@a);
You are not supposed to modify arrays while they are being iterated over.
For speed and efficiency reasons, Perl internally does not do full
reference-counting of iterated items, hence deleting such an item in the
middle of an iteration causes Perl to see a freed value.
- Use of *glob{FILEHANDLE} is deprecated
- (D deprecated) You are now encouraged to use the shorter *glob{IO} form to
access the filehandle slot within a typeglob.
- Use of /g modifier is meaningless in split
- (W regexp) You used the /g modifier on the pattern for a "split"
operator. Since "split" always tries to match the pattern
repeatedly, the "/g" has no effect.
- Use of "goto" to jump into a construct is deprecated
- (D deprecated) Using "goto" to jump from an outer scope into an
inner scope is deprecated and should be avoided.
- Use of inherited AUTOLOAD for non-method %s() is deprecated
- (D deprecated) As an (ahem) accidental feature, "AUTOLOAD"
subroutines are looked up as methods (using the @ISA hierarchy) even when
the subroutines to be autoloaded were called as plain functions (e.g.
"Foo::bar()"), not as methods (e.g. "Foo->bar()" or
"$obj->bar()").
This bug will be rectified in future by using method lookup only for
methods' "AUTOLOAD"s. However, there is a significant base of
existing code that may be using the old behavior. So, as an interim step,
Perl currently issues an optional warning when non-methods use inherited
"AUTOLOAD"s.
The simple rule is: Inheritance will not work when autoloading non-methods.
The simple fix for old code is: In any module that used to depend on
inheriting "AUTOLOAD" for non-methods 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 %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 %s is deprecated
- (D deprecated) The construct indicated is no longer recommended for use,
generally because there's a better way to do it, and also because the old
way has bad side effects.
- Use of literal control characters in variable names is deprecated
- (D deprecated) Using literal control characters in the source to refer to
the ^FOO variables, like $^X and "${^GLOBAL_PHASE}" is now
deprecated. This only affects code like "$\cT", where \cT is a
control in the source code: "${"\cT"}" and $^T remain
valid.
- Use of -l on filehandle%s
- (W io) 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. The operation returned "undef". Use a filename
instead.
- Use of my $_ is experimental
- (S experimental::lexical_topic) Lexical $_ is an experimental feature and
its behavior may change or even be removed in any future release of perl.
See the explanation under "$_" in perlvar.
- Use of %s on a handle without * is deprecated
- (D deprecated) You used "tie", "tied" or
"untie" on a scalar but that scalar happens to hold a typeglob,
which means its filehandle will be tied. If you mean to tie a handle, use
an explicit * as in "tie *$handle".
This was a long-standing bug that was removed in Perl 5.16, as there was no
way to tie the scalar itself when it held a typeglob, and no way to untie
a scalar that had had a typeglob assigned to it. If you see this message,
you must be using an older version.
- Use of ?PATTERN? without explicit operator is deprecated
- (D deprecated) You have written something like "?\w?", for a
regular expression that matches only once. Starting this term directly
with the question mark delimiter is now deprecated, so that the question
mark will be available for use in new operators in the future. Write
"m?\w?" instead, explicitly using the "m" operator:
the question mark delimiter still invokes match-once behaviour.
- Use of reference "%s" as array index
- (W misc) You tried to use a reference as an array index; this probably
isn't what you mean, because references in numerical context tend to be
huge numbers, and so usually indicates programmer error.
If you really do mean it, explicitly numify your reference, like so:
$array[0+$ref]. This warning is not given for overloaded objects, however,
because you can overload the numification and stringification operators
and then you presumably know what you are doing.
- Use of state $_ is experimental
- (S experimental::lexical_topic) Lexical $_ is an experimental feature and
its behavior may change or even be removed in any future release of perl.
See the explanation under "$_" in perlvar.
- Use of tainted arguments in %s is deprecated
- (W taint, deprecated) You have supplied "system()" or
"exec()" with multiple arguments and at least one of them is
tainted. This used to be allowed but will become a fatal error in a future
version of perl. Untaint your arguments. See perlsec.
- 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.
To help you figure out what was undefined, perl will try to tell you the
name of the variable (if any) that was undefined. In some cases it cannot
do this, so it also tells you what operation you used the undefined value
in. Note, however, that perl optimizes your program and the operation
displayed in the warning may not necessarily appear literally in your
program. For example, "that $foo" is usually optimized into
""that " . $foo", and the warning will refer to the
"concatenation (.)" operator, even though there is no
"." in your program.
- Use \x{...} for more than two hex characters in regex; marked by
<-- HERE in m/%s/
- (F) In a regular expression, you said something like
(?[ [ \xBEEF ] ])
Perl isn't sure if you meant this
(?[ [ \x{BEEF} ] ])
or if you meant this
(?[ [ \x{BE} E F ] ])
You need to add either braces or blanks to disambiguate.
- Using a hash as a reference is deprecated
- (D deprecated) You tried to use a hash as a reference, as in
"%foo->{"bar"}" or
"%$ref->{"hello"}". Versions of perl <= 5.6.1
used to allow this syntax, but shouldn't have. It is now deprecated, and
will be removed in a future version.
- Using an array as a reference is deprecated
- (D deprecated) You tried to use an array as a reference, as in
"@foo->[23]" or "@$ref->[99]". Versions of perl
<= 5.6.1 used to allow this syntax, but shouldn't have. It is now
deprecated, and will be removed in a future version.
- Using just the first character returned by \N{} in character class in
regex; marked by <-- HERE in m/%s/
- (W regexp) A charnames handler may return a sequence of more than one
character. Currently all but the first one are discarded when used in a
regular expression pattern bracketed character class.
- Using !~ with %s doesn't make sense
- (F) Using the "!~" operator with "s///r",
"tr///r" or "y///r" is currently reserved for future
use, as the exact behaviour has not been decided. (Simply returning the
boolean opposite of the modified string is usually not particularly
useful.)
- UTF-16 surrogate U+%X
- (S surrogate) You had a UTF-16 surrogate in a context where they are not
considered acceptable. These code points, between U+D800 and U+DFFF
(inclusive), are used by Unicode only for UTF-16. However, Perl internally
allows all unsigned integer code points (up to the size limit available on
your platform), including surrogates. But these can cause problems when
being input or output, which is likely where this message came from. If
you really really know what you are doing you can turn off this warning by
"no warnings 'surrogate';".
- 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) 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 1024 characters. The return value has been truncated to 1024
characters.
- values on reference is experimental
- (S experimental::autoderef) "values" with a scalar argument is
experimental and may change or be removed in a future Perl version. If you
want to take the risk of using this feature, simply disable this warning:
no warnings "experimental::autoderef";
- Variable "%s" is not available
- (W closure) During compilation, an inner named subroutine or eval is
attempting to capture an outer lexical that is not currently available.
This can happen for one of two reasons. First, the outer lexical may be
declared in an outer anonymous subroutine that has not yet been created.
(Remember that named subs are created at compile time, while anonymous
subs are created at run-time.) For example,
sub { my $a; sub f { $a } }
At the time that f is created, it can't capture the current value of $a,
since the anonymous subroutine hasn't been created yet. Conversely, the
following won't give a warning since the anonymous subroutine has by now
been created and is live:
sub { my $a; eval 'sub f { $a }' }->();
The second situation is caused by an eval accessing a variable that has gone
out of scope, for example,
sub f {
my $a;
sub { eval '$a' }
}
f()->();
Here, when the '$a' in the eval is being compiled, f() is not currently
being executed, so its $a is not available for capture.
- Variable "%s" is not imported%s
- (S misc) With "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 length lookbehind not implemented in regex m/%s/
- (F) Lookbehind is allowed only for subexpressions whose length is fixed
and known at compile time. For positive lookbehind, you can use the
"\K" regex construct as a way to get the equivalent
functionality. See "(?<=pattern) \K" in perlre.
There are non-obvious Unicode rules under "/i" that can match
variably, but which you might not think could. For example, the substring
"ss" can match the single character LATIN SMALL LETTER SHARP S.
There are other sequences of ASCII characters that can match single
ligature characters, such as LATIN SMALL LIGATURE FFI matching
"qr/ffi/i". Starting in Perl v5.16, if you only care about ASCII
matches, adding the "/aa" modifier to the regex will exclude all
these non-obvious matches, thus getting rid of this message. You can also
say "use re qw(/aa)" to apply "/aa" to
all regular expressions compiled within its scope. See re.
- "%s" variable %s masks earlier declaration in same %s
- (W misc) A "my", "our" or "state" 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 references to it are
destroyed.
- 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.
- Variable "%s" will not stay shared
- (W closure) An inner (nested) named subroutine is referencing a
lexical variable defined in an outer named subroutine.
When the inner subroutine is called, it will 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.
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 created, they are
automatically rebound to the current values of such variables.
- vector argument not supported with alpha versions
- (S printf) The %vd (s)printf format does not support version objects with
alpha parts.
- Verb pattern '%s' has a mandatory argument in regex; marked by
<-- HERE in m/%s/
- (F) You used a verb pattern that requires an argument. Supply an argument
or check that you are using the right verb.
- Verb pattern '%s' may not have an argument in regex; marked by
<-- HERE in m/%s/
- (F) You used a verb pattern that is not allowed an argument. Remove the
argument or check that you are using the right verb.
- 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.
- Version string '%s' contains invalid data; ignoring: '%s'
- (W misc) The version string contains invalid characters at the end, which
are being ignored.
- Warning: something's wrong
- (W) You passed warn() an empty string (the equivalent of "warn
""") or you called it with no args 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 file system
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 that could also have been 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 put in parentheses to say what you really mean.
- when is experimental
- (S experimental::smartmatch) "when" depends on smartmatch, which
is experimental. Additionally, it has several special cases that may not
be immediately obvious, and their behavior may change or even be removed
in any future release of perl. See the explanation under
"Experimental Details on given and when" in perlsyn.
- Wide character in %s
- (S utf8) Perl met a wide character (>255) when it wasn't expecting one.
This warning is by default on for I/O (like print). The easiest way to
quiet this warning is simply to add the ":utf8" layer to the
output, e.g. "binmode STDOUT, ':utf8'". Another way to turn off
the warning is to add "no warnings 'utf8';" but that is often
closer to cheating. In general, you are supposed to explicitly mark the
filehandle with an encoding, see open and "binmode" in
perlfunc.
- Within []-length '%c' not allowed
- (F) The count in the (un)pack template may be replaced by
"[TEMPLATE]" only if "TEMPLATE" always matches the
same amount of packed bytes that can be determined from the template
alone. This is not possible if it contains any of the codes @, /, U, u, w
or a *-length. Redesign the template.
- write() on closed filehandle %s
- (W closed) The filehandle you're writing to got itself closed sometime
before now. Check your control flow.
- %s "\x%X" does not map to Unicode
- (S utf8) When reading in different encodings, Perl tries to map everything
into Unicode characters. The bytes you read in are not legal in this
encoding. For example
utf8 "\xE4" does not map to Unicode
if you try to read in the a-diaereses Latin-1 as UTF-8.
- 'X' outside of string
- (F) You had a (un)pack template that specified a relative position before
the beginning of the string being (un)packed. See "pack" in
perlfunc.
- 'x' outside of string in unpack
- (F) You had a pack template that specified a relative position after the
end of the string being unpacked. See "pack" in perlfunc.
- 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.
- 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.)
- Your random numbers are not that random
- (F) When trying to initialize the random seed for hashes, Perl could not
get any randomness out of your system. This usually indicates Something
Very Wrong.
- Zero length \N{} in regex; marked by <-- HERE in m/%s/
- (F) Named Unicode character escapes ("\N{...}") may return a
zero-length sequence. Such an escape was used in an extended character
class, i.e. "(?[...])", which is not permitted. Check that the
correct escape has been used, and the correct charnames handler is in
scope. The <-- HERE shows whereabouts in the regular expression
the problem was discovered.
SEE ALSO¶
warnings, diagnostics.