close() or die

[John Bokma]

Recently a customer reported that a Perl script I had written suddenly
reported an error.

It turned out that it failed on the close (it died and reported that the
close failed after writing to the file).

It turned out that his disk quota had exceeded. So it seems that the close
flushed the buffer, which failed, and my script nicely reported this.

Bottomline: check your close. Without this it would have not been obvious.
Even if I use auto-vivication, I close explicitly.

 

[Alan Curry]

Recently a customer reported that a Perl script I had written suddenly
reported an error.

It turned out that it failed on the close (it died and reported that the
close failed after writing to the file).

It turned out that his disk quota had exceeded. So it seems that the close
flushed the buffer, which failed, and my script nicely reported this.

Bottomline: check your close. Without this it would have not been obvious.
Even if I use auto-vivication, I close explicitly.

Testify!

Even if you don't print anywhere but STDOUT, close it and check it.
Redirected STDOUT can have write errors too.

 

[xhoster]

Recently a customer reported that a Perl script I had written suddenly
reported an error.

It turned out that it failed on the close (it died and reported that the
close failed after writing to the file).

It turned out that his disk quota had exceeded. So it seems that the
close flushed the buffer, which failed, and my script nicely reported
this.

Bottomline: check your close. Without this it would have not been
obvious.
Even if I use auto-vivication, I close explicitly.

Also, if you use a pipe-open, some errors are only detected on close.

Xho