Leo,

The docs do eventually indicate that getline behaves as readline. Some of the relevant documentation regarding readline follows (you should definitely read all the docs as I'm not going to touch on other aspects of the interface, such as context-sensitive-return requirements).

If readline encounters an operating system error, $! will be set with the corresponding error message.

Thus, to overload getline, I believe you should apply the same semantics.

,welchavw