Maybe the print is intermittently failing for some reason...  I think print doesn't necessarily set $! when returning false, so when you effectively execute the following code (in case of error), you'd get 

my $file = "/tmp/foobar.txt"; #dir perms 777
open (FILE, ">$file") or die "ERROR: can't create $file: $!\n";
0 or die "ERROR: $!\n";     # <--- dies with "ERROR: Inappropriate ioc
+tl for device"

[download]

In other words, what you see might be just the last errno that occurred, which is the regular (nothing-to-worry-about) ENOTTY from the ioctl belonging to the preceding open: 

$ strace ./837195.pl
...
open("/tmp/foobar.txt", O_WRONLY|O_CREAT|O_TRUNC, 0666) = 3
ioctl(3, SNDCTL_TMR_TIMEBASE or TCGETS, 0x7fffa2ebce90) = -1 ENOTTY (I
+nappropriate ioctl for device)
lseek(3, 0, SEEK_CUR)                   = 0
fstat(3, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0600, st_size=0, ...}) = 0
fcntl(3, F_SETFD, FD_CLOEXEC)           = 0
write(3, "the quick brown fox, etc.\n", 26) = 26
close(3)                                = 0
exit_group(0)                           = ?

[download]

Of course, you'd still have to find the cause for the failing print, but it might have nothing to do with ioctl...

In reply to Re: The old inappropriate ioctl bugaboo again, in mod_perl2 by almut
in thread The old inappropriate ioctl bugaboo again, in mod_perl2 by jcabraham

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