It seems like this may be a very desireable action at times. EG. in the case where you want a script to be interactive, but also have it cronned with all of the values for it in another file. In which case <> will do exactly what you want in both cases.

In which case, you don't want to prompt, because then you get a bunch of prompts in the output, without responses. That... looks... tacky. I'd fatal that in a code review.

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker