True, that.

In practice, I usually dispense with such filetests and just go straight for the open(). But then, I usually program on win32, where that's okay.

I seem to remember, though, that it's perfectly legal to open directory entries, block/char special files, etc on a UNIX filesystem. I included those specific tests to cover those cases. You (probably) don't want to read your persistent INI from a serial port, nor save it to a directory inode.

I didn't check for read/write permissions, because open() will do that. Also, it encourages checking the return value of open(), which was most of my point -- it avoids code like this:

   if ( -r $file )
   {
      open(FILE, $file);

      # hmmm... is the file open or not?

      my @contents = <FILE>;
      close FILE;
      # process @contents;
   }
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