You are right, of course. In fact, it looks like you'd have to do something like...

my @a = readdir(FH);
die $! if !@a and $!;
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... to catch an error for readdir (in list context). Now that I think about it, readdir() either fails when you fail to open the filehandle, in which case you should have check opendir(), or you have something really strange happen (i.e. reading from a NFS-ish directory and the server goes away and you have the filesystem soft mounted). So it was a very bad example.

-- bluto