When you open a pipe to a command, the corresponding close will return false if the command exits with a non-zero exit status or if one of the system calls involved fails. When a close fails you should also examine $? to see if it contains information about the failure. The docs for close suggest this method:

close QSTAT or die $! ? "Error closing qstat: $!"
                      : "Exit status $? from qstat";

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We're not surrounded, we're in a target-rich environment!

In reply to Re: Why might a close operation die? by jasonk
in thread Why might a close operation die? by talexb

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