use Fcntl;
sysopen my $fh => "/path/to/file", O_RDONLY | O_CREAT, 0666 or die;
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Abigail

my $filename = "testfile.txt";
{
    open FH, "<$filename"  
    or ( open FH, ">$filename" and close FH and redo ) 
    or die "Bleah!\n$!";
}
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There's more than one way to do it. ;)

Yeah, but if the file you want to open has permission 0200, it's going to bite you twice. First it'll wipe out the data in the file, then it gets stuck in an infinite loop.

Just use sysopen.

Abigail

Oh, that's a great point. The basic problem is that if the file does exist but cannot be opened for reading, yet can be opened for output, my method will clobber what's there and then continue looping forever.

I suppose that's why I should have just used the '-e' function:

if ( -e $filename ) {
    open FH, "<$filename" or die $!;
} else {
    open FH, ">$filename" or die $!;
    close FH;
    open FH, "<$filename" or die $!;
}
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At least this eliminates the potential for the endless loop.




Dave

Thanks for your replies. thats lot of info.