My money is on:

>As of Perl 5, @ symbols even in "here-documents" (like this) MUST be
>proceeded with a backslash. No ifs, ands or buts.

This has gotten me any number of times.
Roy

On Wed, 25 Feb 1998, Mark Hazen wrote:

> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: John Kelly <jck@toptenlinks.com>
> 
> 
> >I have swish-e installed on a virtual server at iServer and am having
> >trouble customizing the header output via the util.pl file. I just get
> >the following error message in my browser.
> 
> 
> (much stuff deleted)
> 
> Your problem is a buggy program which can't run, either straight from the
> command line or via CGI. There are numerous reasons the latter could be true
> (permissions, incorrect pointer to Perl, et alia); the former is
> tautalogical. If you can get a positive response from "perl -c
> <yourprognname>" you can look through the myriad of reasons the program is
> unrunnable by the server. Check your web server docs for this.
> 
> In preview to an expectation that the following might be causing you grief:
> 
> >href="mailto:feedback@toptenlinks.com">
> 
> As of Perl 5, @ symbols even in "here-documents" (like this) MUST be
> proceeded with a backslash. No ifs, ands or buts.
> 
> Also:
> 
> >    print <<ENDHEAD;
> 
> You should put a space between the word ENDHEAD and the end of statement
> semicolon. That's a gotcha I've found over time.
> 
> I suggest including "use diagnostics" at the start of your script (after the
> line calling Perl, or course) to give you more information on what exactly
> is wrong with your script (it provides more verbose output messages). Also,
> for any CGI program I heartily endorse "use strict" and including the -Tw
> flags in your first line which calls Perl (unless you're using mod_perl, in
> which case see the mod_perl docs for info on turning  on taint checking);
> these are first for security reasons, and the "use strict" forces you to
> write tight code (which ends up running cleaner, and safer usually). The
> O'Reilly "programming perl" (Camel) book would be your best reference on
> these modules.
> 
> Hope this helps,
> 
> -mh.
> ----
>    . _+m"m+_"+_   Mark Hazen    Network Administrator, Dean's Office
> d' Jp     qh qh             The Franklin College of Arts & Sciences
> Jp  O       O  O             The University of Georgia (706)542-1546
> Yb  Yb     dY dY
> O   "Y5m2Y"  "     even the mightiest wave starts out as a ripple.
>   "Y_           why make waves when it's easier to nurture ripples?
> 
> 
>