Well, there are a few solutions to this.

My bug was: require DBI looks for "DBI.pm" because DBI is a bareword; but this does not work if you put the bareword in a variable and require that instead.

One simple solution is to just:

./test.pl DBI.pm
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If you don't like that, you can change the eval to a string eval, which will interpolate the package name into a bareword before require sees it:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
my $perl_module = shift;
eval "require $perl_module" or die "Can't find $perl_module!";
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This would be the more flexible solution, since it would handle things like ./test.pl DBD::PgSQL (assuming that makes sense... basically, any module with ::'s in it).

Alan