On 30 Jan 2012, at 15:26, Paul Johnson wrote: > could you explain why you think checking the return value of close() is > silly? I tend to have the opposite opinion.
I don't have the slides of the talk I gave on Defensive Perl Programming a couple of years ago, but there's a definite case or two of printing to a *socket* that can cause the print to fail when the far end goes away.