I'm curious why is -e is what I usually see for file existence checking and not -f?

I'd say it's probably because -f can be a little too restrictive:

$ perl -le 'print -f "/dev/null" ? "IS" : "is NOT", " a file"'
is NOT a file

[download]

but it's also true that sometimes -e gets overused when a more restrictive check would have been better, for example at least checking ! -d.

Update: Just to clarify what I meant with the above example: If a user is supposed to supply a filename to a program, then in a lot of cases the program shouldn't reject /dev/null and just work with it as if it was a regular file. Of course there might be cases where a program would want to accept only regular files - but then again, -f also returns true if what's being tested is a symbolic link to a file, so one would have to check for that specially too.

In reply to Re^3: Check if file exists by haukex
in thread Check if file exists by Anonymous Monk

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.