I don't know if that's at all possible. AFAIK, $! is magic, in the sense of internal perl magic.

You can try to work around with ^H. If your error messages are not meant for anything but displaying on a terminal, you can append a series of ^H after your digit to overwrite it, then the message, which won't change the numeric value. Not really helpfull in a log file, but it works on a term:

$error = "2\x08message";
print $error+0 . "\n";
print "$error\n";
[download]

HTH

--bwana147