Unable to decipher "exec eval..."

[jnair]

Hi all,

I saw this following in a Perl file I am running on a Win32 system:
"eval 'exec perl -S $0 "$@"'
if 0;"

Can any one cast some light on this?
Thanx in advance. And sorry if this is one of those oft-repeated simple queries.

regs,
Jayaram.

 

[MikeLacey]

Hi Jay,

No, strangely enough I don't think I've seen that question before.

That construct is hardly used nowadays (unless someone else reading this knows different) and is a way to execute Perl scripts on systems that don't support the #!/bin/perl kind of thing you see at the top of most unix scripts.

On Win32 systems you can just ignore it.

On Unix systems you'll probably want to replace it with a #! line that points to your copy of perl.