I'm not saying that you're wrong about that, but can you point me to where this behavior change of $! is documented?

I have never tried testing to see if die "$!" provides more information than die "$!\n". The reason that I have been including "\n" is that I'm primarily working on Windows and I have seen instances where not using "\n", the next command prompt is being displayed on the last output line of the die statement. That's not necessarily a major issue, but I do find that to be a bit annoying. By adding "\n", this puts the next command prompt on a new line.

After seeing your post, I've looked at the perldocs for open, perliol, perlopentut, and perlvar and I was not able to find anything that indicated that "\n" would affect the contents of $!. If what you are saying is true, then it might a good idea if the perldoc for open could be updated since there are a few examples of open or die structure that has "$!\n" in the input to the die statement.

On the other hand, I did find information in perlvar that corroborates what tye said about $^E potentially providing more detailed information on some operating systems (including Windows).

In reply to Re^3: Permission denied when opening files in Windows by dasgar
in thread Permission denied when opening files in Windows by jsnicaise

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.