You make a couple of good points Coruscate and are probably worth pointing out to avoid confusion. I made that observation myself in this thread. For the record though, I generally use parentheses around functions (just my coding style) and therefore use || and && when testing return values:

open($someFile) || die "Couldn't open $someFile - $!\n";
opendir(DIR, $someDir) || die "Couldn't open $someDir - $!\n";
system($shellCommand) && die "Couldn't run $shellCommand - $!\n";
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-- vek --