Sorry, that's absurd - if your salary depends on writing code, you can never ignore failures due to system errors! Check Camel page 606.

How does checking the amount of free disk space before and after execution help?

This script isn't the only process running - lots of other stuff will be using up disk space as well in an unpredictable manner. And if the partition's full at run end, that doesn't tell me if my output succeeded or not. Finally if I'm querying variable length fields out of a database, I dont know how much data I'm going to write before run time.

Checking disk space can *never* work. 

>If your hard drive is full, you have more to worry about than a 
>perl script failing to die 'gracefully'
Some of these scripts drive the back ends for multi-million pound companies, I DO need to worry about how they handle errors. If a partition fills up it doesn't mean the system will fail - like most companies, our system directories are mounted on different drives from our data directories.

If a write fails during a run I'd better try damn hard to log the failure into a database, get an email to an administrator, then try to switch output to a different mounted drive. Yes there are sysadmin checks for disk space, but that's no excuse for a script failing to act sensibly when the worst happens.

Unfortunately, this is the kind of reply I expected - "they're only a few scripts, why does it matter if you lose some data?". Well it does matter for people doing this stuff commercially, and I wish (some) authors would start to realise this!

When I'm writing a 20 liner at home, yes i don't care too much, but these are CPAN modules, and by implication others are going to use them, and they therefore need to be robust and behave sensibly when errors occur.

Thanks for the reply - It's good to get an alternative viewpoint even if I have to politely disagree :)

In reply to Re: Re: <rant>CPAN modules failing to check for write errors</rant> by Anonymous Monk
in thread <rant>CPAN modules failing to check for write errors</rant> by Anonymous Monk

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