Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

[email protected] (Kay-Uwe Kasemir) · Thu, 04 Mar 1999 09:17:39 -0700

Dear tech-talk reader:

When trying to build EPICS R3.13B12 on my PC I ran into a problem
that is caused by Perl.  I am using the latest Perl that I could find on
www.perl.com:

>C:\Kay\Epics\epicsR3.13B12>perl
>
>use English;
>
>print "This is Perl version $PERL_VERSION, running on $OSNAME";
>^Z
>This is Perl version 5.00503, running on MSWin32

With this version, src\tools\rm.pl and ...mkdir.pl have to be changed
slightly:

at the beginning, change
	getopt();
into
	getopt('');    (two single ticks (') generating an empty string)

This error is very unexpected to me because
a) The Perl Book claims that for Perl being very tolerant
    false equals 0 equals '' equals <nothing> equals <end-of-file> ....
    This error should never have occured!
b) I intentionally based both Perl scripts on the Perl standard library
Getopt::Std
    in order to be system- and version independend...

-Kay

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System