When the readdir fails to deliver the entire contents of the directory, there is NO warning, nor any other message, issued by Perl. Thus, I don't believe that trapping warnings, nor the warnings pragma, will help.

It may be right, but if you don't try, you'll never know. Especially, if you don't turn on warnings with the warnings pragma, you're not gonna get those warnings. In my tests, when I tried to readdir on a close dir, I did not get any message unless I explicitly added the 'or die "$!"' clause to my readdir instruction.

Consider this:

$ perl -e  '@c=readdir DIR ; print "@c\n";'

No warning, nothing. Compare to this; 

$ perl -w -e  '@c=readdir DIR ; print "@c\n";'
Name "main::DIR" used only once: possible typo at -e line 1.
readdir() attempted on invalid dirhandle DIR at -e line 1.

[download]

Turning on the warnings with the -w command line option gave me two warnings that might explain where my problem is. Or consider this:

$ perl -e  '@c=readdir DIR or print "$!"; print "@c\n";'
Bad file descriptor

[download]

In reply to Re^3: Testing for readdir failure by Laurent_R
in thread Testing for readdir failure by Bob Cook

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.