Even though I think I know quite a bit about perl, having to maintain other peoples perl code can sometimes be "fun" :), one script I got had a construct I'd never seen before and I still can't find any documentation on it, but I assume someone here knows. This demonstrates how it was used... 

my @foo = qw(a b c d A "B C" D); # Test data...

print join "|",  @foo;  # What the test data looks like
print join "|", <@foo>; # do { Magic } :)

[download]

...now I know about using <> for IO and also as a quick way to do csh style shell expansion. But the above usage seems to use it to do some kind of shell argument grouping (it also works differently on win32 vs. Unix).

So, is there any documentation on it that I've overlooked? Is it actually guaranteed to continue doing what it does (it seems to not have changed at least between 5.0005 and 5.8.0).

Whether the person who wrote it was insane or not isn't part of my question :)

--
James Antill

20031106 Edit by jeffa: Changed title from 'Bizard usage of <>'

In reply to Bizarre usage of <> by nevyn

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