Ack. Very good question. Never tried that. I seem to have aquired a foot in my mouth.

You can get to any core function through CORE. For instance if you override print you can still call the real one as CORE::print. OTOH that does seem to be hacked in at a low level. I cannot figure out how to find it.

Normally, of course, your %package:: would work. But not in this case. :-(

BTW if you are curious, perlsub says that if you override a function in CORE::GLOBAL you will override the built-in in all namespaces. I didn't know that. I don't think that I particularly wanted to either...