I don't know if its directly related, but this makes me think of a LDAP helper module I wrote for a system I now have in production.

I won't go into too much detail, but (among other things) it had a "login" and "logout" method. Each updated a global session data hash with info about the current user. These methods throw exceptions if something goes wrong. Nothing fancy so far.

Later, I wanted to make a facility for administrators to "become" a normal user (think Unix "su"). However, I wanted to make it so that if the operation failed, it would restore the existing session. So, I wrote this code:

    my %ubackup = %udat;
    eval {
        $self->logout;
        $self->login(username => $username);
    };
    if($@) {
        %udat = %ubackup;
        die $@;
    }
[download]

Now this looks fine, but any errors were being mysteriously swallowed. Turns out the culprit was my LDAP object destructor, which did this:

sub DESTROY {
    my ($self) = @_;

    eval {
        $self->_unbind;
    };
}
[download]

ie shut down the connection, and ignore errors.

The login/logout methods create LDAP objects as part of their operation, so of course they were being destroyed at the end of the method. The call to _unbind was trampling $@.

This was a nightmare to track down. The solution was to simply localise $@ in the destructor.

    local $@;
    eval {
        $self->_unbind;
    };
[download]

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