Hacking Perl Code

[carlriz]

Hey guys, I was reading 'cool uses for perl' and came across some code. What is the '=<<' operator? What is 'eval $begin.$content;' (specifically, you can concat. these?)? Just curious how this works (maybe the rest of the code too).

my $file = $ARGV[0];
my $content = do { open my $fh, '<', $file or die $!; local $/; <$fh> 
+};
my $begin =<<'THEEND';

UNITCHECK {
    no strict; # access $VERSION by symbolic reference
    no warnings qw (uninitialized);
    print map {
        s!/!::!g;
        s!.pm$!!;
        sprintf "%-20s %s\n", $_, ${"${_}::VERSION"}
    } sort keys %INC;
    exit;
};

THEEND

eval $begin.$content;
print $@ if $@;