I suspect that it's not as complicated as all that NT specific stuff blakem mentions, if the problem is happening on BSD as well.

If you're invoking the script as 'perl taint.pl', then the switches in your hashbang line aren't being executed as early on as they possibly could be.

Assuming this is the case, you have two options (at least on BSD):

Invoke it as 'perl -T taint.pl', or make the script executeable and invoke it as './taint.pl'

Have fun!

elbieelbieelbie