It is important that to take great care when posting code which relies heavily on exact duplication, as

<CODE> stuff here </CODE>
is not the same as
<CODE>
stuff here </CODE>

In addition to that, if you hit the d/l code link, perlmonks will print all the stuff in-between code tags, but it will also tack on 3 newlines at the end, but in this case, it doesn't matter.

Your code works as advertised, given that you didn't have beginning whitespace, and that the "d/l code" link was clicked.

If you go ahead and click "d/l code" on my post, you can see that it works.

++ Nice job (worked on win32 and cygwin)

undef$/ ;
 open
 (
 d
, $0
)
  ;
$_=
<d>
 ;
           close
 (
d
)
 ;s/[^\n ]//g

;


s/ /0/g
   ;
     s/\n/1/g
 ;
for
  $i
      (
0   ..   23
 )
{
$a  =
  substr
(
        $_
, 5   *   $i
,   5
)
 ;
 print
(
  chr
 (
$a=~/0{5}/?32:(96+oct("0b$a"))
  )
 )
};

####################
################# NOTE, THERE IS NOTHING BEFORE
################# undef$/ ;
################# IT IS THE FIRST LINE
__END__
invoking perl f>>f yields (given you call your file f)
just another perl hacker
[download]

____________________________________________________
** The Third rule of perl club is a statement of fact: pod is sexy.