Let's say you have the following Perl script which prompts a user for input.

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;

print "password: ";
my $password = <STDIN>;
chomp $password;

Running this script will produce the prompt. Let's say the use enters a value that contains the dollar sign $ character.

~]# perl example.pl
password: its$secret

At this point, the $password variable will contain the dollar sign character. For example, here is how you can output the value of the $password variable.

print "password = $password \n";

Which should output the following.

password = its$secret

Here is how you could update the $password variable so that the dollar sign character is escaped.

$password = s|\$|\\\$|g;