I'm with you in your second paragraph too. I have not fear of (Perl's) dangerous things (and if you search for mine usage of eval string you can say i hazard..) but i also like to know when something is flammable. The last test (ovverding $1 above) was chocking for me. I'd like at least be adviced by the perlrun man page.

More: the -s inanity respect variables declared with my and the few words dedicated to it let me think of some vestige from the past. Imagine if -s had the ability to modify lexical variables in the main package just after their first declaration: with this ipothetic functionality you would be able to ovveride some default value to test your program in seconds, from command line. Like a totally new environment.

If I remember correctly -s is in the default shebang of some valuable monk here around.

Many question are still open for me as why it not deparse to nothing and why the last behaviour ovverriding or not a readonly variable depending on the qq()

At the end I confess i found not enough information to have my curiosity satisfied and i hoped this post could get some interesting contribution from them who know more.

thanks again for your keen sight and your opinion.

L*