Hi Ken not sure I understand your reply as I'm not having a specific problem with PERL or disagreeing with a document, just wanting clarification on file handle modes which I imagine is not specific to PERL. I've been a native (if infrequent) speaker of PERL for about 20 years now and have thus lost the ability to compare PERL with one of the saner languages but it's true I began this library out of frustration when I originally went from DOS/Pascal to Unix/Perl. I started polishing it again when I discovered wantarray and the fact I could initiate a hash by passing it an array. On the one hand typing my %hash = file2hash($file) is very satisfying but on the other, testing (defined wantarray) to return a scalar is truly disgusting to anyone that's ever tried to learn PERL by reading it.

As for the guides a fairly representative one is at https://perlmaven.com/open-to-read-and-write . As you can see seek and truncate are requirements in that use case but it doesn't go on to explain if you can replicate the effect of opening a+ by not doing them (or why you would die with a message about mailboxes but I digress :)

In any case the replies have somewhat illuminated the case for these weird file modes so I've made them optional parameters to the write_open sub which seems preferable to writing multiple routines.

In reply to Re^2: What is the point of a+ and w+ when opening files? by Maelstrom
in thread What is the point of a+ and w+ when opening files? by Maelstrom

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