Oh it gets better. I don't think anyone in that node mentioned the following interesting behaviour:

$_ = "Where did I come from?\n";
package Private;
print $_;
[download]

Isn't that odd? Try this the other way.

package Irrelevant;
$_ = "Bye, bye";
print $Irrelevant::_;
[download]

What is going on here? Quite simple. There is a small list of "special" symbols which are always in package main by default no matter what package you are in. *_ is one. *INC is another.

But what this really means is that you really share $_ with anything you call, making it easy to have a bad module wipe out $_ unexpectedly.

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