use Perl

• use fatal 'print'; ? (Score:1)

  by osfameron (3135)

  > If you didn't get a true value back from print, you didn't really put data in the file.
  
  Wow! That's a surprise to me, and I certainly don't check the return value of print in my own code. I guess an easy way to bundle this up would be to make print fatal in a block that prints to file handles, and trap with eval? Are there other (better) ways to handle this?

  --
  

  osfameron
  • Re:use fatal 'print'; ? (Score:1)

    by link (3402)

    I do not think you can use fatal with print as afair the way print works can not be expressed with a prototype
    
    perl -e'use Fatal qw(print);'
    Cannot make a non-overridable builtin fatal at /usr/share/perl/5.8/Fatal.pm line 108.
    
    Another thing worth remembering is print doesn't seem to return failure every time it fails. I think it returns success if you print to a file in a full filesystem ( or did when I checked on linux and hp a year or so ago ).
    
    • Re:use fatal 'print'; ? (Score:1)

      by rjbs (4671) on 2006.02.02 7:47 (#45990) Homepage Journal

      It does seem like sometimes I can print to a file and have no error code, if the disk was full. In that case, close should fail; I'm not sure why close's failing didn't make things work properly... I will investigate this further.
      
      Fortunately, I also patched to check that -s $file >= length $message.

      --
      rjbs

      Reply to This

      Parent

      • Re:use fatal 'print'; ? (Score:2)

        by jmm (276)

        Checking the final length of the file is a good thing, but it is also a bit limiting. It can only be done when you know that the output is going to a real file on a real file system; if you do it if when you're accepting a "file name" from the user, you preclude the option of being given a device or a command pipeline instead of a file. That could limit the potential flexibility for using your program.
        • Re:use fatal 'print'; ? (Score:1)

          by rjbs (4671)

          Sure, but fortunately in this case I didn't define the API, and can rely on real filenames going to a real filesystem. ...should I be concerned that I think it's OK to say, "I didn't define the API and can therefore rely on it?"

          --
          rjbs