I couldn't sleep last night and started deobfuscating this. This is very rough and i haven't investigated too closely how it actually does stuff - just ran perltidy, then dropped some basic substitutions and dropped prints in certain places
(ie the third and fourth arguments with "e" in the middle)
Yes. I wanted to insert some dummy code that used the other variables but forgot it :^). Now I think it was a good thing because otherwise that code would stand out among the rest. I also wanted to give the code a dollar shape, but didn't (and don't) know how.
As for the generation of the code, turo, it wasn't automatic. Just search and replace here and there.