"me";
9999;
{ throw => 'away' };
this program surely does nothing. By the way, if you ask for warnings, Perl will tell you so:
$ perl -w -e 42
Useless use of a constant in void context at -e line 1.
The one-liner is a noop over the standard input, which in this case comes from the pipe echo test |. So it allows you to do nothing, while consuming the input.
As a side note, there's nothing special about 42 except it is the Answer to The Ultimate Question Of Life, the Universe and Everything in pop culture. Very common in humorous pieces of code. |