I’ll sometimes do this as an explicit pre-flight check. If so, it’s either because:

  1. I use this program deep in the code and I don’t want to have to unroll a bunch of state (or fail and leave a broken mess) if I get halfway through and then find a critical external program is missing.

  2. I want to be unusually user-friendly for a Unix program. Seriously, sometimes the failure that results “naturally” is misleading and will leave the user (usually me) scratching their head and having to troubleshoot. I can save them (myself) a bunch of time if I simply tell them (me) what's wrong.

I agree there’s no point to checking for availability on the line before you try to run the program; you might as well just process the error from system or whatever.

– Aaron
Preliminary operational tests were inconclusive. (The damn thing blew up.)

In reply to Re^2: Check for another program availability by Radiola
in thread Check for another program availability by hrcerq

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.