Re: strawberry's silent con

Thanks for the tips - I'm glad to know there is at least a way to test
for the situation. autodie looks particularly interesting for reasons
beyond just this. I think I'll play with that when I get the chance,
but for now this issue of CON is only an issue when I'm (rarely) on
windows.

On Mon, Nov 8, 2010 at 5:13 PM, Jan Dubois <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Mon, 08 Nov 2010, E. S. wrote:
>> Opening a file named "con" (possibly followed by a dot and some
>> extraneous characters) for writing from within perl does not signal an
>> error, even though windows doesn't allow it. Instead, the opened file
>> handle acts as if everything is OK - you may write to it, close it,
>> select it, flush it, wine and dine it. You may even spend an hour
>> trying to figure out why, when all of these things happen without
>> error, your file doesn't actually exist when your program is finished
>> (until you realize what silly things your operating system is doing or
>> preventing you from doing).
>>
>> I'm using the portable version of strawberry out of the box on win
>> xp. Another more serpentine language gives a permission error when
>> trying to open 'CON.dat' (or any of the various other problematic DOS
>> names). This annoyed me enough to post here: Anybody know of a way to
>> make perl gag when trying to open the special, un-openable DOS files
>> like CON?
>
> You can use the "-c" file test to check if open() returned a handle to
> a regular file, or to a character mode device (like nul, aux, lpt1, com1
> etc).
>
> If you want to automate this for all open() calls, then check into
> subclassing the autodie module to add that check.
>
> If you don't want to add "use autodie" to your module, either add
> -Mautodie to your PERL5OPT environment variable, or add the use
> statement to your Perl/site/lib/sitecustomize.pl file.
>
> Cheers,
> -Jan
>
>
>