"So i should check to make sure that the value is numeric before passing it to seek"

You can, yes. Doing it this way will allow you to handle the error yourself:

my $offset = 'blah';

if ($offset =~ /^[0-9]+$/){
    seek $fh, $offset, 0;
}
else {
   die "offset needs to be numeric";
}

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In reply to Re^3: perl not going to error path by stevieb
in thread perl not going to error path by gupr1980

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