Question

When I invoke my Perl scripts in the Windows environment without invoking perl first, the parameters are not passed to my script.

For example,

C:\my-perl-scripts\foo.pl bar

invokes foo.pl, but it doesn’t recognize bar as a parameter (@ARGV is empty). However,

perl C:\my-perl-scripts\foo.pl bar

works as expected.

Is this a configuration issue?

Ideally, I’d like to be able to distribute some Perl scripts, have the user add C:\my-perl-scripts\ to the path and then just be able to invoke foo.pl from anywhere while running cmd.

If they have to specify perl first, then they’ll always have to give a complete path.

To show that the assoc and ftype are correct on my system, I executed the following commands.

assoc .pl

Output:

.pl=Perl

And

ftype Perl

Output:

Perl="C:\Perl\bin\perl.exe" "%1" %*

And:

more t.pl

Output:

print "'$_'\n" for @ARGV;

And:

t a b
    perl t.pl a b

Output:

'a'
'b'

And (no output):

t.pl a b

I included both the output of t and t.pl to show it’s not a %PATHEXT% problem. Both outputted nothing as originally described whereas invoking perl first gave the expected response.

The problem appears to be on my vista business box. On my Windows XP Pro box, it works as expected. Both have ActivePerl 5.8.9. I have another Windows Vista Home box that I have not yet tried yet.

I found the answer (posted below). I found it by running a registry cleaner, removing the Perl installation, running the registry cleaner again. On the second cleaning, only one invalid entry remained—the one that was causing the problem (probably left over from a previous installation).

Answer 1

I found out what the problem was. Although the ftype and the assoc values were set as suggested, the actual behavior on my system seems to be determined by the registry key

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Applications\perl.exe\shell\open\command

It should have a (Default) string value of "C:\Perl\bin\perl.exe" "%1" %*

When I found this entry, it was set to "C:\Perl\bin\perl.exe" "%1". Changing it immediately fixed the problem.

Why was it set that way in the first place? I don’t know. Maybe from a previous installation?