perlquestion tadman Inside of [IO::Socket].pm, there is some rather unruly looking Perl in the connect() routine. In particular $! is used as a hash, implying that there is something called %!, which in fact seems to exist (according to 'perl -w' anyway). <CODE> if ($timeout && $!{EINPROGRESS}) { # ... </CODE> It's bizarre enough that $! behaves differently in a string context versus a numeric one, but now it has some sort of hidden "hash" context?