If "the value of $\ is later changed" was a genuine concern, a better way would be to explicitly code the following rather than expecting a subsequent maintainer to automatically realise why printf was used here:

...
{
    local $\;
    print "\x{FEFF}";
}
...
[download]

And, of course, a much better way to change $\ in the middle of the program, would be along these lines:

... code as it is now ...
# later changes:
...
{
    local $\ = "\n";
    ... code using changed $\ ...
}
...
[download]

I like your solution making the printing of the BOM a local block better than my use of printf, thank you. I will use that.

Peter

TIMTOWTDI.

In Perl, printing exactly one character—a Unicode byte order mark—and nothing else is a special case of formatted printing, vis-à-vis generalized printing of lines of text with built-in programming conveniences (e.g., automatic newline handling).

Would you find this troublesome?

    printf '%s', "\N{U+FEFF}";
[download]

Or this?

    printf '%c', 0xfeff;
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Jim

This really has nothing to do with what, if anything, I find "troublesome".

You hit the nail on the head with your earlier post: "Using printf in this admittedly unusual way ...".

Writing code in an unusual way (without any indication of why this was done) makes future maintenance error-prone.

Yes, there's more than one way to do it. Here's another, that simply adds a comment, that I would consider better:

printf "\x{FEFF}";  # printf() so $\ is not appended
[download]

-- Ken