In fact close can indeed fail because, for instance, the disk is full and so it cannot flush buffers. In which case you probably want to report that and possibly want to stop processing. And closing a pipe can give you all sorts of error information.

Also according to the documentation for 5.6.1, an explicit close resets $. while an implicit one due to a following open does not. If you are reporting $. and want that to be accurate, then it is better to do an explicit close whether or not you pay attention to its return value.

In reply to Re: Re: problems returning from recursive subroutine by Anonymous Monk
in thread problems returning from recursive subroutine by melguin

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