Inside of IO::Socket.pm, there is some rather unruly looking Perl in the connect() routine. In particular $! is used as a hash, implying that there is something called %!, which in fact seems to exist (according to 'perl -w' anyway).      if ($timeout && $!{EINPROGRESS}) { # ... It's bizarre enough that $! behaves differently in a string context versus a numeric one, but now it has some sort of hidden "hash" context?