Ahah! You're quit correct then that it doesn't make sense to rely on the value of $!.

Yes, I saw that and still thought Perl was creating the messages. My bad. It's not like I couldn't have tested it on OpenBSD and Linux instead of just the FreeBSD I wrote it on - alas, I was lazy.

Well, I guess that makes this code even more obfuscated... even when it runs, one does not know what it did! ;-)