There's no point in flocking a file that you destroy before you obtain a flock.

But, getting to your taint issue, there's also no place in having a generic "untaint" subroutine. The act of untainting is always specific to the narrowest definition of what is permitted in the data. You don't have just "untaint", you have "untaint_username" or "untaint_hostname". And "untaint_email_address" cannot exist, because every possible character is possible in an email address. {grin}

Also, "tainting" is generally associated with programs running in "taint" mode, which I'm not seeing in your snippet. And when that happens, you need to execute a specific form of match to get rid of the taint. Something like: 

$data = /^([a-z]+)$/ or die "data isn't just alphabetic!";
$data = $1; # now grab the untainted version

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-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker
Be sure to read my standard disclaimer if this is a reply.

In reply to •Re: First Time Untainting Data by merlyn
in thread First Time Untainting Data by svsingh

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