I believe that this was discussed here some years ago, and that this was suggested by TomC. Anyway, I pushed a patch on rgs/nomagicopen. The patch is incomplete as it lacks docs and tests. I welcome feedback on the intent of the feature. commit 7f5bb3418c4fc2d6e2523bf918a7d9e33f9a7acc Author: Rafael Garcia-Suarez <rgs@consttype.org> Date: Thu Jul 24 17:43:29 2014 +0200 Introduce the double-diamond operator <<>> This operator works like <> or <ARGV>, as it reads the list of file names to open from the command-line arguments. However, it disables the magic-open feature (that forks to execute piped commands) : $ bleadperl -e 'while(<>){print}' 'echo foo |' foo $ bleadperl -e 'while(<<>>){print}' 'echo foo |' Can't open echo foo |: No such file or directory at -e line 1.Thread Next