$! !!!!!!

Turns out, the more recent versions of Perl (starting with 5.16.4 or maybe even earlier) have changed the way they treat the error variable $!. This special can not be assigned any arbitrary error text any more, now they want it to be a proper integer OS error code. So all the Triceps error reporting through $! breaks on the newer versions of Perl. The code still works, except that the text of the errors can not be extracted,

Well, looks like it's about time to bite the bullet and finally convert everything to the newer and better error reporting with confessions.