The $ vars lead me to either Shell, Perl or PHP. $_ is a special var in Bash and Perl. The '.' char is for string concat in Perl and PHP So, I think this is

The $ vars lead me to either Shell, Perl or PHP. $_ is a special var in Bash and Perl. The '.' char is for string concat in Perl and PHP So, I think this is perl. The first statement evaluates to: "echo Brian Rogers >&2" The second statement `$_` runs that command. The end result is that this line of code prints: Brian Rogers