And, for good measure, I tried this: $ perl t/harness t/codingstd/perlcritic.t t/codingstd/perlcritic......ok All tests successful. Files=1, Tests=15, 29 wallclock secs ( 0.00 usr 0.00 sys + 24.11 cusr 0.11 csys = 24.22 CPU) Result: PASS
... which makes the 'make test' failure even weirder, since 'make test' is nothing more than a 't/harness' call with specified args. Cf. config/gen/makefiles/root.in: test : test_prep $(PERL) t/harness $(EXTRA_TEST_ARGS) $(PARROT_ARGS)