Inappropriate ioctl for device using Phi.pm on system call

To_Bz has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hello Monks, I'm getting the following error message from a perl module called Phi.pm.

I can not execute the PHI test: Phi: Inappropriate ioctl for device at /biologia-scratch3/mc.martinez297/programs/Unus-master/Unus/Test/Phi.pm line 63

First, I thought it was a problem related with permissions, so I changed them. This module has read and execution permissions.

So, then I looked the line 63, and I have the following:

61 chdir "$aln.phi";
62 system "$phi -f '$aln' &>$aln.phi/Phi.out";
63 LOGDIE "I can not execute the PHI test: $phi:\n$!" unless $?==0;
64 -s "Phi.log" or LOGDIE "PHI test ($phi -f '$aln' &>$aln.phi/Phi.out) returned an empty output, please check '$aln.phi/Phi.out' to inspect the reason s.";

I read the recomendations in http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=589324 , and they recommended to erase $! but I don't know what to do with $?==0, since $! and $? are "different types of error conditions"(http://perldoc.perl.org/perlvar.html)

However, I still don't understand what is happening with these variables.

I'm new in Perl, so I'll appreciate the help

Comment on Inappropriate ioctl for device using Phi.pm on system call

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Re: Inappropriate ioctl for device using Phi.pm on system call by GotToBTru (Prior) on May 19, 2014 at 22:38 UTC
You need to find out what was in the variable $phi when then system command was run on line 62. That is the program that is generating the error. 1 Peter 4:10	[reply]
Fix $? check by dolmen (Beadle) on May 23, 2014 at 08:55 UTC
First, never put execution permission on a .pm! For the probable cause of your error, have a look at the manual for the "system" function (`perldoc -f system`): If you'd like to manually inspect "system"'s failure, you can check all possible failure modes by inspecting $? like this: if ($? == -1) { print "failed to execute: $!\n"; } elsif ($? & 127) { printf "child died with signal %d, %s coredump\n", ($? & 127), ($? & 128) ? 'with' : 'without'; } else { printf "child exited with value %d\n", $? >> 8; }	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Inappropriate ioctl for device using Phi.pm on system call by aitap (Curate) on May 25, 2014 at 10:26 UTC
"Inappropriate ioctl for device" is not the cause of the error since you don't do any ioctl yourself on any device. $! sometimes gets set so a non-zero value even if program works normally (for example, on my machine `perl -E'require DBI; say $!'` prints `No such file or directory`). What you need to do is to inspect the `$aln.phi/Phi.out` file (it's where PHI's STDOUT ans STDERR were redirected). You can edit line 63 to print `$?` and `$aln.phi` if you need to know their values.	[reply] [d/l] [select]