After giving it a bit more thought, I realized that the only "acceptable" error from mkdir (the only one you want to continue looping after) is EEXIST (File exists). So maybe it makes more sense to loop on that error. That eliminates the need for any flags, or any extra error checking to avoid a race condition: 

$my $counter = 1;
use Errno qw[ EEXIST ];
sub mk_new_dir {
  while(1){
    my $name = $word . '_' . $counter++;
    if( mkdir $name, 0755 ){
      return $name;  # success, return new dir name
    } else {
      next if $!{EEXIST}; # mkdir failed because the file exists; loop
+ and try next name
      die $!;             # it failed for some other reason; bail out!
    }
  }
}

[download]

Aaron B.
My Woefully Neglected Blog, where I occasionally mention Perl.

In reply to Re^7: getting a while loop to terminate by aaron_baugher
in thread getting a while loop to terminate by Aldebaran

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.