Not quite sure what you mean by the 'I really don't care if the file doesn't exist initially since I'm going to build it if it doesn't'. When a file is opened with the > prefix you're opening it to write to it, and any file already there of that name will be blanked anyway. When this open fails it means you can't build the file there, maybe you don't have write permissions, or maybe the filesystem is completely full.

If you're planning on building a file and open ">file" fails then you do have problems since you can't actually write to the file and dying is probably a good plan.

In reply to Re: To die or not to die by Molt
in thread To die or not to die by Popcorn Dave

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