And I believe you can also use sysopen to create files if they aren't there and error if they are,

You can, and O_CREAT and O_EXCL are exactly the flags the OP needs.

C:\t>set DIRCMD=/b

C:\t>dir newfile
File Not Found

C:\t>perl -MFcntl -e "sysopen F, 'newfile', O_EXCL | O_CREAT or die"

C:\t>dir newfile
newfile

C:\t>perl -MFcntl -e "sysopen F, 'newfile', O_EXCL | O_CREAT or die"
Died at -e line 1.

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In reply to Re^2: What's the best way to avoid name collisions when creating files? by bmann
in thread What's the best way to avoid name collisions when creating files? by philiph

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