$/kEND parse error nightmare

< ^ > P N |<>|^_>< --- | ~ ...Help

Hello,
  In all the time I've used Ruby, I've never come across such an aggravating, 
uninformative error message... argh!

parse error, unexpected $, expecting kEND

 wtf?

  Regards,
     Kurt

% ruby --version
ruby 1.8.4 (2005-12-24) [sparc-linux]