Code obfuscation

[John Poltorak]

Can anyone explain what this code in autoupdate does? :-


my $macros = new Autom4te::XFile ("$autoconf"
               . " --trace AU_DEFUN:'AU:\$f:\$1'"
               . " --trace define:'AC:\$f:\$1'"
               . " --melt /dev/null |");


It appears to be causing the error msg:-

no such file or directory: /dev/null

on OS/2. This may be due to a bug in sh or Perl on OS/2 but it's difficult 
to debug. What exactly is the purpose of '/dev/null |' above, and can I 
try using something else instead just to get a pointer to the underlying 
problem?

-- 
John