Make that 'my' a 'local'... geez... trying to respond too fast. Just to be sure I checked my code and only find one place where I used slurp mode that wasn't in a 1-liner, and I used local there. Glad you reminded me -- as I'd started to get it in my head that braces or my were needed...

Looks like most common usage for me is shell-1-liners where Shell can't deal with NUL terminated lines, so need perl to do that.