It's like the prefix equivalent of the fat arrow. Unary string minus.

From perlop:

       Unary "-" performs arithmetic negation if the operand is
       numeric.  If the operand is an identifier, a string con-
       sisting of a minus sign concatenated with the identifier
       is returned.

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In reply to Re: Why doesn't Perl warn me about this bareword? (IO::Prompt prompt -line) by fishbot_v2
in thread Why doesn't Perl warn me about this bareword? (IO::Prompt prompt -line) by j3

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