Thank you, BrowserUk... and I'm sure future explorers will do likewise.

      + + !

Uh ... sorry to be a wet blanket, but it doesn’t help on my system (Strawberry Perl, Windows 8.1, 64-bit):

19:01 >perl -e "srand 42; print sort {4-rand 9} split //, 'ts aroMrhir
+sae C tll!!ym';"
l ttyaMeos  arrCsrihm!!l
19:01 >perl -e "use Math::Random::Mt qw[rand srand]; srand 42; print s
+ort {4-rand 9} split //, 'ts aroMrhirsae C tll!!ym';"
l ttyaMeos  arrCsrihm!!l
19:01 >perl -v

This is perl 5, version 20, subversion 0 (v5.20.0) built for MSWin32-x
+64-multi-thread
[download]

:-(

Athanasius <°(((>< contra mundum

Iustus alius egestas vitae, eros Piratica,

. sorry to be a wet blanket, but it doesn’t help on my system (Strawberry Perl, Windows 8.1, 64-bit):

Of course not. It would need to have been used by the author when constructing the obfu.

---

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Examine what is said, not who speaks -- Silence betokens consent -- Love the truth but pardon error.

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In the absence of evidence, opinion is indistinguishable from prejudice.

l ttyaMeos arrCsrihm!!l

With my perls, the original one-liner works as intended for 5.8.8 up to and including 5.18.0.
But with 5.20.0 I get the same as you.

The srand documentation contains this:

However, there are a few situations where programs are likely to
want to call "srand". One is for generating predictable results,
generally for testing or debugging. There, you use
"srand($seed)", with the same $seed each time.
[download]

That suggests to me that srand(42) should produce identical results whenever it is called.
I can't find anything in the docs that indicate there have been changes to srand - grepping 5.20.0 perldelta for srand produced no hits.

However, there *is* mention (in perldelta) of changes to rand with 5.20, and I guess that if the rand implementation has changed then the same seed will no longer yield same results.
I do think that the breakage of srand($seed) between 5.20 and earlier perls should have been spelled out in the srand documentation ... probably worth a bug report from someone who cares.

Cheers,
Rob