Just now, while attempting to do



print "$user's crontab is missing!

"

I got the error “Use of uninitialized value in concatenation (.) or string…”, and after a bit of testing, I discovered that “$package'varname” is apparently an alias of “$package::varname” (in my case, Perl was trying—and failing—to print $user::s).

Did everyone else know this? This is literally the first time I have run across this in almost 20 years of Perl programming

(Of course a quick Google search turns this up in the opening paragraphs of the perlmod docs—I wonder if it’s time to read all of that stuff cover-to-cover?)