Thanks for the reply, but to clarify, it's not a limitation, it's a bug or a misconfiguration. Stuff like Term::ReadLine allows you to use fancy Emacs-like control characters for editing, but this is more fundamental. If I hit the '(' key, i.e., shift-9, it backspaces! I know it sounds insane, but that's what actually happens when I run a Perl app that reads from stdin. It's a new behavior on my two FreeBSD systems -- everything used to be fine until last month.