The return value of a piped open tells you if the fork succeeded or not, the return value of close tells you about the execution status of the program in the pipe. So, if $ENV{PATH} is set such that perl can't find the program to be piped to/from, close will return a false value (perl was able to successfully fork, but not execute the piped command).

I tried this, and it doesn't work as you described: If Perl can't find the program to be piped to, the open command fails.

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Remember: There's always one more bug.

I'm not entirely sure that's correct. For my test code, if the program cannot be found, open will not succeed.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;

open(BAD, "/no-such-path/not_here.sh |") || die "Died with: $!\n";
close(BAD);
[download]

Does in fact die on open with Died with: No such file or directory.
-- vek --