Wow, you sure picked the wrong way to try to fix this problem. This 'fix as many places where writing is done in as many CPAN modules as we can' idea is just plain untenable.

Hold on, I havn't picked any way to fix this - I gave an example of the kind of thing I would *expect* to see in modules on CPAN, and I'm simply seeing what others think. IIRC there's already a pragma to force system errors to die instead of return false (though I can't remember it off hand), but that really isnt the point.

I'm not suggesting every/anyone goes through every module on CPAN fixing stuff in the manner of the *example* I gave - I'm saying authors should be thinking about these things *before* releasing modules to CPAN or maybe there should be be some basic quality checks on modules before they get released to CPAN.

Without such, I'll continue to not check the results of write operations but to warn of close failures.

Warn or die on close failures? If you just warn, that's fine - carry on doing what you do, but at some point you'll lose data and probably never realise it unless you've got a sig warn handler installed.

You or I or anyone else could use, say, XML::Smart and write a script that appeared to run fine but actually failed to output data. Anyone seriously suggesting that's fine needs their head examining IMHO, and I'm amazed that a number of replies have said exactly that.

Edit by tye, remove PRE tags, replace with BLOCKQUOTE