This is a bug report for perl from cce@andrew.cmu.edu, generated with the help of perlbug 1.26 running under perl 5.00503. ----------------------------------------------------------------- [Please enter your report here] When dereferencing hash entries in a particular way on the argument line of a format, Perl does very strange things during compiling. On a Redhat 5.1 machine running Perl 5.005_03, it would generally find nonexistent text on a blank line. (The following error:) ----- Semicolon seems to be missing at ./bad.pl line 9. syntax error at ./bad.pl line 10, near "Title2" Bareword found where operator expected at ./bad.pl line 15, near "*u" (Might be a runaway multi-line << string starting on line 13) (Missing operator before u?) syntax error at ./bad.pl line 15, near "(" Unrecognized character \010 at ./bad.pl line 15. ----- Note that above, the string "*u" was actually "au", with an upward accent (/) above the a. Also, the "(" was some unreproduceable string which cut-and-paste under X mangled. Slight variations on the code produced other non-ASCII symbols. On the machine detailed below (from which this report is sent), the same code gave this error message: ----- Semicolon seems to be missing at ./bad.pl line 9. syntax error at ./bad.pl line 10, near "Title2" Out of memory during ridiculously large request at ./bad.pl line 13. ----- The code giving these errors follows: ----- #!/usr/bin/perl #use FileHandle; open OUT, "> output.txt"; format Format = Title1: @<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< "$h{primary}" Title2: @<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< $h{irrelevant}