I think you're being a bit unreasonable in this reply. There are a large number of things that you shouldn't pass to open (or anything outside your program). Yes, 'somebody' could document all of the many exploits that can be prevented by using -T, but a desire to avoid -T is no reason to complain about perl not covering up holes in the underlying OS's system calls. And Yes, if you are writing a program that takes input from the untrusted, you should understand the weaknesses of the APIs and system calls to which you are passing off this untrusted data. This is the whole point of taint mode.