Checking the return value of close() (was: Apache::DBI and DBIx::*)

2004-08-13 Thread John Siracusa 
On 8/13/04 5:23 PM, Perrin Harkins wrote:
 On Fri, 2004-08-13 at 17:15, John Siracusa wrote:
 Something tells me you haven't been bitten by this bug yet, but let me save
 you the grief.  When, say, your disk fills up and you let that file handle
 go out of scope, close() will silently fail when trying to flush the buffers
 to disk.
 
 If you're concerned about that, you should actually check the return
 value of print() as well.

Believe me, everyone should be concerned about that :)  Also, the return
value from print() is not always useful.  In the situation I described, for
example, print will happily return 1 so long as what it's printing fits in
the output buffer, regardless of whether or not the data is actually going
to make it to the disk.  Checking the return value from close() gives a more
reliable answer, and you only have to do it once at the end.

-John



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Re: Checking the return value of close() (was: Apache::DBI and DBIx::*)

2004-08-13 Thread John Siracusa 
On 8/13/04 10:34 PM, John Siracusa wrote:
 In the situation I described, for example, print will happily return 1 so long
 as what it's printing fits in the output buffer, regardless of whether or not
 the data is actually going to make it to the disk.

Er, that should read regardless of whether or not the disk is full, since
making it to disk is outside the scope of Perl's core functions (and may
be outside the scope of the OS if the hardware lies :)

-John



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