Not sure if this didn't find favour, or was just lost while the cvs was down. Re-posting in case it was the latter: The format of the failure messages from the perl "Test" module is not quite the same as from its normal compiling, * progmodes/compile.el (compilation-error-regexp-alist): Add perl "Test" module error messages. I've only ever bothered with the plain ok(X) form myself, which is the first message shown in the comment, but I added the other styles too. Sample foo.pl I used below.