The Obfuscated Perl Contest is opened to all Perl programmers. They must write a Perl program that must not be easy to understand.

In the Fifth Edition, it was 4 categories: Create A Diversion, from 512 to 2048 bytes; World Wide Wasteland, 512 bytes; Inner Beauty, 512 bytes; and The Old Standby, 256 bytes, that must output "The Perl Journal".

Various examples of all the competitions (the fifth one was assigned in the mid-2000) are on http://www.sysadminmag.com/tpj/obfuscated/.

This code was written by Christopher Gutteridge. It outputs an ASCII clock, and uses CygWin32.

#!/usr/bin/perl

$;="@{'`|;{'^'!.|-'}";$.++;$.++;$.++;$_="(.)?";/((?{$_.=$_}).)+$/;@_='~!@#$%^&*(
)_+`-=[]\\{}|;\':",./<>? '=~/$_/;@_ _=$;=~/$_/;$_="(.)*?";/((?{$_.=$_}).)+$/;$Z-=
$Z;"$.$."-$Z;/((?{$_ _[$z]&&!("${_[$x]}"^"${_[$y]}"^"${_ _[$z]}"^"$Z")&&($a.=$_[$x
],$b.=$_[$y],$z++);$x++;$y+=!($x%="$.$.");$y%="$.$.";}).)+/;$_="^"^"^";$_ _=".>.\
'$_ _ _$b')".".('!\@/\"'^'}.')".']}`';

print;