BUU's right - don't do that. Do you mind saying what influenced you to change the default value of $\ in the first place? Have you been doing it in order to save a bit of typing when sending data to STDOUT? In other words, do you have a coding style similar to:
sub display {
local $\ = "\n";
print "This is the first line. Look ma, no newline";
print "This is the second line.";
}
In a brief
Chatterbox discussion on this point,
Zaxo made the comment that
Archive::Zip could avoid this type of problem by localizing $\ itself.