So this one was tricky since it didn't run out of the box due to a problem with quote escaping in the exec ... So here is the solution, that we, a collective of rebel monks for CLEAN CODE have to offer :
Most of the steps are unclosed in {} , to add some obfu .

  • First of all we have a split on either @ARGV or on a long list of num ber if @ARGV is empty . The result goes into @_ (deprecated implicit split to @_ )

  • After this we shift an element that goes to $^ ( the fact that this variable has a meaning for perl formats is here for confusion ...)

    Then we initialize the hash %$^ with two values.Key 1 is the strange _/ sign and key 0 is the new line operator ! This is very tricky since it looks like an empty string but the fact that the carriage return is between the two quotes is taken into account !

  • Then we test (with the ternary operator ? : ) the value of $^ if it is 1 or 0 we print the corresponding value from that %$^ hash . If it is some other value we will print that number of spaces (use of x for strings).

  • At this point we join the list @_ , which has one less element since we shifted something from it .

    In the next block we do : 

    {$^="'$^'"}

    [download]
    This is done to protect the arguments passed to the exec and didn't work with perl 5.6 on windows and 5.005 solaris . So we did instead : 
    {$^="\"$^\""}

    [download]
    Now comes the call to this same script via exec, passing the shifted @_ as an argument and testing if there is more than one argument .

    At this point you see that this will either print _/ or spaces or new lines and it is the choice of the numbers in the initial list that gives the following result : 

                _/  _/_/_/_/  _/_/_/_/  _/    _/
           _/  _/    _/  _/    _/  _/    _/
    _/    _/  _/_/_/_/  _/_/_/_/  _/_/_/_/
   _/    _/  _/    _/  _/        _/    _/
  _/_/_/_/  _/    _/  _/        _/    _/

    [download]
    • Rock on !

    ps : since it failed on our box could you tell us on what kind of OS and perl version did you run it ??

    In reply to Re: Live and Die by de_cristian_izer
    in thread Live and Die by cristian

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