Hi,
thanks to the help from the CB I have collected some answers.

• I am still confused about the way $! behaves in this case, but I am not supposed to understand it (unless I learn the internals of Perl) and I am only supposed to use it when any error was signaled.
• The desired outcome of bsd_glob can be achieved by passing the flag !GLOB_NOCHECK. Then the returned list will not contain the search pattern upon unsuccessful globbing. In my case this was hard because the real-world application in question sometimes uses a full pathname as a search pattern.
• For performance and sanity my routine will first do a test for file-existance and then try to glob it. It feels clumsy, though.
• Another way to check the outcome would be to undef $! before calling bsd_glob but since the documentation does not explicitly state the observed behaviour I will not rely on it to work.

I think this sums it up.

Thanks

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