Hi
Athanasius!
I tested the -s operator on my Windows system with a null file (zero length). I do get a numeric 0 for a null file. Here is the test code. I did verify that 'zero' is indeed of 0 length with file manager. I think -s returns undef if the file does not exist (which is different than exists, but empty).
#!usr/bin/perl
use warnings;
use strict;
`copy NUL zero`; #create empty file cp dev/null zero on unix?
my $size = -s 'zero';
print $size; #does print "0"
__END__
0
Update: FYI for Windows users who don't use the command line much... NUL is a reserved word in the Windows file system for "the bit bucket". Unix folks are familiar with this concept, but sometimes Windows users aren't.
someprogram > NUL does not create a file called "NUL", this just throws away STDOUT and it goes nowhere, i.e., the "bit bucket". There is no file called "NUL". To make an empty file, I copied the "bit bucket" to a file.