To update this to a newer version of perl, you should use warnings;. With that, you can turn off particular warnings with no warnings qw( uninitialized ); in this case. The old -w switch turns on all warnings.

Your code has a serious deficiency in that division places the left side of the string comparison in numeric context, and is then stringified to '0' by the ne operator. The right side, being undef, stringifies to an empty string. The comparison cannot succeed unless $value equals '0'.

On line numbering, you can modify perl's notion of __LINE__ and __FILE__ with the #line nnn ffff.ext directive. (Added) It follows C rules for preprocessor directives. Here's a command line example of its use:

$ perl -e'
> #line 42 bogus
> die "As expected"'
As expected at bogus line 42.
$
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