To be honest, it was not very obfuscated - I was able to deduce what it printed right away. (blame my C experience for actually knowing the decimal characters!). Obfuscated code should be very hard to decipher. Basically, you want to do the oposite of all the "good coding" rules. Don't use something self-explanatory like "@list and &show." Use funky quoting schemes (qq! etc.) instead of plain quotes. Don't put all your array element transpositions and assignments in order (you change $list[0], then $list[1], $list[2], etc. Play around with seldom used features, strange side-effects, and some of the variables that people seldom use like $^A or $,. Misdirect, and make people think the code is doing one thing while it is doing another. Throw in bits that don't do anything useful at all. Don't do things the "standard" way. And it's probably best not to use strict - it severly limits all the tricks and pseudo-legal expressions that form good obfuscated code. Just some quick thoughts...