The nuclear power plant software looks like it is written in VB, but it might be MFC. That, along with Flash and Crystal Reports. I hope you feel confident about that!

BOOM !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

For the necessity of testing, I was thinking of the earlier example of the failover of a full nfs filesystem to a new one. That seems like a fair amount of code, and if I wrote it, I would need to test it.

Ah yes - I see what you mean. For really critical things I can't see any way round it - generally I assume that any failure from a print is serious enough to switch fs and log whatever was in $!. As you say, it's vitally important that the error handling code does get run before it goes live :)

Thanks for the info on File::Slurp - I'll have to check it out. No doubt there are modules with good I/O handling on CPAN but I couldnt tell you off hand - another thing to add to my todo list :)

So I'm going to go off, do a bit more research, and hopefully come back to the monastery with an article and maybe some code for review. Give me a few days and I'll be back :)