Re: Restoring the magic to the _ filehandle in Perl 5.8.9

[ikegami]

As you've stated, if you delay the execution of the code, there's no problem. I presume the reason you're using BEGIN is that the code inside will end up in a module. But you're not out of luck. Execution of INIT blocks are delayed until the main script has finished compiling.

If you change

BEGIN {
    *::_ = sub {
        # Shout to be understood
        return uc($_[0]);
    };
}

to

BEGIN {
    INIT {
        *::_ = sub {
            # Shout to be understood
            return uc($_[0]);
        };
    }
}

then the parser won't think the "_" in "-l _" is a function call since there's no function called "_" yet.

Caveat: Modules loaded after the script has been compiled...