in reply to Re: Testing for readdir failure (Perl-bug)
in thread Testing for readdir failure

perlvar says in the second paragraph about $!:

Many system or library calls set errno if they fail, to indicate the cause of failure. They usually do not set errno to zero if they succeed. This means errno , hence $! , is meaningful only immediately after a failure:

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Re^3: Testing for readdir failure (Perl-bug)
by LanX (Saint) on May 25, 2013 at 10:26 UTC
    yes, but did you notice:

    ------ Error: on --- Reset: off $! 17: File exists

    I included all cases for completeness and to make it easier to find the bug.

    Maybe this is clearer:

    DB<105> $!=666 => "Unknown error 666" DB<106> $!=666;scalar readdir X or warn "$!\n" Unknown error 666 DB<107> $!=undef;scalar readdir X or warn "$!\n" Bad file descriptor

    As you can see $! needs to be reset in advance "to be meaningful".

    Cheers Rolf

    ( addicted to the Perl Programming Language)

      As you can see $! needs to be reset in advance "to be meaningful".

      Yup, logic bug is logic bug :)

      Compare Perl_do_close (called by pp_close ie close ) to pp_readdir

      pp_readdir test errno without localizing, do_close doesn't test errno at all

      closedir has this issue, and probably many others, maybe 40 others

      I wouldn't be surprised if other functions testing errno have this issue too -- this needs explicit testing / reviewing / patching

        > closedir has this issue, and probably many others, maybe 40 others

        well at least readline, but now setting to undef doesn't help here.

        Additionally I couldn't figure out why readdir sometimes throws warnings and sometimes not.

        I already prepared a bug report and will send it tomorrow.

        Cheers Rolf

        ( addicted to the Perl Programming Language)

        I have practically no knowledge of C nor Perl's C code, so could you describe the effect(s) of this logic bug at the Perl level?