I can think of two ways a read from a successfully opened file could fail:

Opening a file for write access and then trying to read from it. Perl catches this.

Opening a file on removeable media, and then the media is removed before the read attempt.

Under win32 (native), this results in an "Abort, retry, continue" popup. Retry is loop unless it is reinserted. The other two result in the read completing as if the file where empty. Ie. a successful read of zero bytes. I'm not sure what *nix would do under these circumstances.

Examine what is said, not who speaks.
"Efficiency is intelligent laziness." -David Dunham
"Think for yourself!" - Abigail
"Memory, processor, disk in that order on the hardware side. Algorithm, algoritm, algorithm on the code side." - tachyon

In reply to Re^2: Testing for read() failures on different platforms by BrowserUk
in thread Testing for read() failures on different platforms by leriksen

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