So my co-worker Anthony was having trouble getting the last access times of all the files in a directory: 
ls | perl -nle 'print "$_: ", -A'

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He got lots of blanks when it came to the -A. So I told him to turn on -w. He got lots of warnings. I tried the program on my machine, and it worked fine. I tried it on his machine, and it didn't work. So I tried explicitly using /bin/ls and it worked.

With a sour expression on my face, I typed alias ls, and what did I see? ls --color But his terminal wasn't set up to display color. That was a fun brain-wrecker: the ANSI codes were in the filenames, and thus, -A "\e[...foobar\e[..." returned undef.

_____________________________________________________
Jeff japhy Pinyan: Perl, regex, and perl hacker.
s++=END;++y(;-P)}y js++=;shajsj<++y(p-q)}?print:??;

In reply to Why system calls suck. by japhy

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