Re: Simplify parsing a file

On a side note, $! is only meaningful after doing something with the operating system, such as opening files. In code like this:

if($#ARGV < 0){
    die "You did not specify any files to process! : $!\n";
}
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there won't be any useful information in $!.

Comment on Re: Simplify parsing a file Download Code

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Re^2: Simplify parsing a file by myrrdyn (Novice) on Apr 02, 2007 at 18:44 UTC
oh, i thought that would give me info about what caused it to die. Now that I looked it up again, do you think $@ is really what I should use?	[reply]
Re^3: Simplify parsing a file by chromatic (Archbishop) on Apr 02, 2007 at 19:36 UTC
No. Why would it be? There's no system error. There's merely a usage error. You didn't make a system call that failed (`$!`) and there's no caught exception (`$@`). Your program didn't get called with any arguments, which your code detects itself, and there's no more information to provide about the source of the error--you know exactly what the source of the error is! Now I prefer to write that code as: `die "No files to process\n" unless @ARGV;` ... mostly because I prefer the boolean check of the number of elements in `@ARGV` to checking the number of the last array index.	[reply] [d/l] [select]