I certainly know that a close on a handle that you have written to can fail because the disk is full. But we are talking here about closedir. Closing a directory handle you have only read from.

I ask again, for which kind of failure do you want to prepare, and which action, different that you would normally take, do you want to take in case of failure?

Also according to the documentation for 5.6.1, an explicit close resets $. while an implicit one due to a following open does not. If you are reporting $. and want that to be accurate, then it is better to do an explicit close whether or not you pay attention to its return value.

Goodie. Here's another random quote from the documentation of an old version of Perl. Let's take 5.001k for instance.

       dump LABEL
               This causes an immediate core dump.  Primarily
               this is so that you can use the undump program to
               turn your core dump into an executable binary
               after having initialized all your variables at the
               beginning of the program.  When the new binary is
               executed it will begin by executing a goto LABEL
               (with all the restrictions that goto suffers).
               Think of it as a goto with an intervening core
               dump and reincarnation.  If LABEL is omitted,
               restarts the program from the top.  WARNING: any
               files opened at the time of the dump will NOT be
               open any more when the program is reincarnated,
               with possible resulting confusion on the part of
               Perl.  See also -u option in the perlrun manpage.
[download]

It has nothing to do with closing directories, but then, $. has nothing to do with it either. But you seem to like posting random trivia of old versions of Perl.

Abigail