http://qs321.pair.com?node_id=734575


in reply to Re^3: Perl cheat sheet
in thread Perl cheat sheet

$! was an unfortunate choice of variable. :-) It's a dualvar so it has different values if treated as a string or as a numerical.

open my $fh, '<', 'this does not exist'; printf "%s (%d)\n", $!, $!; __END__ No such file or directory (2)
It's better to just create a copy and pass that, if the subroutine doesn't copy the argument.

lodin

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re^5: Perl cheat sheet (dualvars)
by ikegami (Patriarch) on Jan 07, 2009 at 09:23 UTC

    The example was fine. It doesn't make sense for logger to need the dualvar.

    • If you wanted to pass the error string to the sub, the caller would use "$!".
    • If you wanted to pass the error number to sub, the caller would use 0+$!.
    • If the sub needs both an error string and an error number, it would take two arguments.
    • If the sub wants to look at $!, it wouldn't take it as an argument.