That is a good idea even when not on Win32. Some reasons include:

• "." is often not in $ENV{PATH} under Unix
• Your permissions might be wrong under Unix
• Your file associations might be wrong under Win32
• File associations break I/O redirection under Win32

This does the trick (Win2K), the strange thing is that without the pipe you don't need to call perl explicitly - as '.pl' is associated with perl.

And of course - Windows doesn't give a damn if the pipe is broken or not and outputs:

Writing line 1
Read_three got: This is line number 1
Writing line 2
Read_three got: This is line number 2
Writing line 3
Read_three got: This is line number 3
Writing line 4
Writing line 5
Writing line 6
Writing line 7
Writing line 8
Writing line 9
Writing line 10
Wrote 3 lines of text
[download]

-- Hofmator

Writing line 1
Read_three got: This is line number 1
Writing line 2
Read_three got: This is line number 2
Writing line 3
Read_three got: This is line number 3
Writing line 4
Writing line 5
Writing line 6
Writing line 7
Writing line 8
Writing line 9
Writing line 10
Wrote 3 lines of text
[download]

$PM = "Perl Monk's";
$MCF = "Most Clueless Friar Abbot Bishop";
$nysus = $PM . $MCF;
Click here if you love Perl Monks