There's two problems here. The first is stat() and the second is sysread() (and, I would presume, syswrite() as well). stat() treats scalar filehandles as unopened. If you comment out that section in File::Copy::copy(), sysread() treats it as a "Bad file descriptor". I would argue that both are bugs, but that's because they violate the Principle of Least Surprise.

My wife's blog

In reply to Re: There be dragons (or, perl5.8's open stringref breaks...) by dragonchild
in thread There be dragons (or, perl5.8's open stringref breaks...) by Tanktalus

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