At 07:39 PM 8/29/00 -0700, Dirk Myers wrote:
>Tonight, the role of "Peter Scott" will be read by Perl RFC Librarian :
>
> > =head1 DESCRIPTION
> >
> > In a scalar context, the result should remain the same as it is now. It is
> > very tempting to make the list context return be the I<successfully>
> > altered files, which is far more intuitive given the scalar context
> > behavior; but that is almost certainly not the list the user will be
> > interested in and they'd just end up doing the C<grep> suggested in the
> > docs (Camel III) anyway, which calls the filesystem function once for each
> > file.
>
>
>My worry is that it seems like this would return
>an empty list on success, so:
>
> @foo = chmod 755, "bar", "baz", "quux"
> or die "Whoops, died on success!";
>
>
>This seems to me to go contrary to the way perl tends to work... are
>there any other functions (beside system) that do this? Am I
>misunderstanding this?
No, you've hit on the biggest flaw of the RFC. I am less enamored of it
now than I once was. I'd still like to get those individual failure
reasons but I am beginning to think it is not worth the cost. Anyone got a
brainwave on how to have the cake and eat it too?
--
Peter Scott
Pacific Systems Design Technologies
