How about something that uses the output of unlink for a good purpose? no sense in letting it go to waste, after all...

@files = qw/file1 file2 file3/;
$cnt = unlink(@files);
unless( scalar(@files) == $cnt ) {
    die("Problem unlinking $files[$cnt]! $!");
}
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also, this tells you which file was the problem, e.g.

Problem unlinking file2! No such file or directory at del.pl line 4.
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there's always a better way. is there something better here?

Update 2002-06-19: yes, there's a better way. the above code assumes too much about the return value from unlink.

you can't reliably determine which file(s) failed to unlink from the return code alone. i suggest the following modification, which will report accurate results:

unless( $cnt == @files )
{
  die 'Problem unlinking ', $cnt, ' of ', scalar(@files), ' files! ', 
+$!;
}
[download]

=Particle