Agreed. I did not think about that. And I usually don't do such a print anyway but rather a die statement (although, going to the end of this logic, what do you do if die fails? Do you 'die "i failed" or die "die failed"'?

Usually, the only reason I want to know that opening a file failed if to get an immediate diagnostic of the reason for the program failure. If the print statement fails, well, I am likely to have more severe problems than just file opening.

die doesn't have a useful return value (to my knowledge), and would never be placed on the lefthand side of a logical short circuit.




Dave