subroutine not working

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

I am working with several flat file databases, pulling info out of them and generating reports in HTML. I have been count the number of entries in each file, and if there are no entries, want to display a page stating that there are no entries for that file. I've written the script to do this, but if the script opens a file with no entries, the script fails. Can anyone tell me what I'm doing wrong here? Here is a snippet of my code:

$lines = 0;
open (DATABASE, "$filename" || &ErrorMessage);       
    while (sysread DATABASE, $buffer, 4096) {        
        $lines += ($buffer =~ tr/\n//);
    }
close(DATABASE);    
if ($lines == 0){
   &NoReport;
}

sub NoReport {
   print "Content-type: text/html\n\n";
   print<<EOL;
<html>
<head>
<title>No Report</title>
</head>
<body bgcolor="white">
<h2>
No information has been submitted for the report you have requested.
</h2>
</body>
</html>
EOL
exit;
}
[download]

I probably just overlooked something simple. Thanks for your time.

Comment on subroutine not working Download Code

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Re: subroutine not working by runrig (Abbot) on Sep 11, 2001 at 01:08 UTC
This does not look right. You are not checking the status of open: `open (DATABASE, "$filename" \|\| &ErrorMessage); # Did you mean this? You should also probably pass '$!' to # and include '$!' in ErrorMessage open (DATABASE, $filename) \|\| &ErrorMessage;` [download] But if you're just checking for any content, why not just use `-s $filename`??	[reply] [d/l] [select]