in reply to Re^3: automounted directory status
in thread automounted directory status

I am not asking 'What is the UNIX representation of it's status. I am asking 'If I write, will it succeed?' The answer is YES, so that is the answer I should get, not something conditional, like, 'well this is a UNIX system with automounted directories and this directory is not currently mounted so NO, but ask the right question and you will get YES'. Perl is supposed to be portable isnt it?

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Re^5: automounted directory status
by DrHyde (Prior) on Feb 04, 2014 at 12:20 UTC

    I'm sorry, but you are *not* asking "If I write will it succeed". -w doesn't mean that. -w will also return true on filesystems that are full, or are out of inodes. All -w means is "does this resource have a write bit set for the current user".

    Yes, perl is portable. That doesn't mean that you don't have to care about portability. For example, to make your code work on both Windows and Unix you have to care about whether lines of text end in \n or \r\n and to be rather careful about how you open files. Well, dealing with automounters is apparently another of those things where you need to be careful about portability.

      Perhaps I should have said "If I write, is it possible I will succeed". My point is that the documentation (perldoc) clearly states " -w File is writable by effective uid/gid". It does not say "The write flag is set". I appreciate I am going to get nowhere with this argument. It is just irksome to have to revisit a mountain of code to take this into consideration now that our automounted filesystems are more frequently unmounted.