On 15 Jun 2006, at 12:22, Dennis Putnam wrote:
I'm not exactly sure this is what happened but I can't think of anything else. After installing several packages from CPAN, my daily log maintenance began failing. After some investigation I found that '/etc/periodic/daily/500.daily' was getting an error from the '/usr/bin/head' command. When I ran 'head' manually the command was not the normal one. It appears that one of the perl packages replaced the normal 'head' command that works on files, with one that works on URLs. Has anyone encountered this, or can anyone determine if my surmise about one of the perl packages is correct? Thanks.
This is a common gotcha on Os X. For some reason which I forget, but which I think was due to backwards compatibility with earlier versions of MacOs, the standard file system is not case sensitive: HEAD and head are considered equivalent.
In the Perl distribution there is a script called "HEAD" which indeed does fetch the header of an HTML file from the web. This clashes with the standard Unix "head" command.
There is a standard workaround, but just renaming the HEAD script solves things without (ISTR) breaking too much else.
