I've spent alot of time googling and supersearching but haven't made much progress with this problem. I'd appreciate any feedback, references, etc. I'm using Archive::Tar to create and read tape header files on my Solaris 8 box (Perl 5.8, Archive::Tar 1.07). I started out using backtics w/gtar, but decided I'd might get better error handling using a Perl module.

Following the examples in the module documentation I arrived at the following: 

use strict;
use warnings;
use Archive::Tar;

my $device = '/dev/rmt/1';
my $tar = Archive::Tar->new();
warn $tar->error unless $tar->read($device);

my $header_file = 'tape.header';
my @files = Archive::Tar->list_archive($device);
my $junk = $tar->get_content($header_file)
      or die "### ERROR - No such file in archive: '$header_file'\n\n"
+;

__OUTPUT__
Warning: something's wrong at test.errors.pl line 7.
No such file in archive: 'tape.header' at test.errors.pl line 11
### ERROR - No such file in archive: 'tape.header'

[download]
The results bother me for three reasons:
  1. What's with the warning, is it an indicator that I'm trying to use tar->error in a way that it shouldn't be?
  2. Is it normal for Archive::Tar to burp warning messages ("No such . . .)? Shouldn't it just return warning/error codes and rely on the programmer to handle them?
  3. The first message is a Perl warning, not an Archive::Tar warning. I googled on "Warning: something's wrong at" and found an interesting but unrelated Re: "Database handle destroyed" quirks
As for #2 above, I know I can use $Archive::Tar::WARN = 0; but the module docs advise against it. Has anyone else experienced these problems and what can I do to eliminate them?

Thanks

In reply to Archive::Tar and error handling by Anonymous Monk

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