There are a whole bunch of functions, such as chdir, open, print, etc., etc., whose return values one should check to make sure they succeeded. (Most Perl programmers I know check the return value of open; some check the return value of chdir; no one checks the return value of print.) This is particularly recommended for functions that perform system calls, such as open or fork.

It would be nice if there was a way to tell perl to die (with an appropriate error message) whenever any of these functions failed. This would not be necessarily good for production code, but I think it would be handy during prototyping and for one-off scripts.

I have not figured out any way to do this simply. The only solution that comes to mind is to override all these functions. Is there a simpler approach?

the lowliest monk


In reply to wishlist: die-on-failure for built-ins by tlm

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