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in reply to Safe way to open files

Here's an approach that reduces the number of file-opening calls you need to manage --- determine what flags you want on the file handle and use sysopen once. In the following modes 1 and 2 act like > and >> respectively, else the file is opened read-only. This can be altered --- if you'd rather fail on attempting to append to a non-existing file, remove the O_CREAT flag from mode 2 for example.

use Fcntl qw(:DEFAULT :flock); # assume $flock_enabled set accordingly sub safe_open { my $fn = shift; $fn =~ s/^(>>?)//; $mode = length($1); my $flags = $mode == 1 ? O_CREAT | O_WRONLY | O_TRUNC : $mode == 2 ? O_CREAT | O_WRONLY | O_APPEND : O_RDONLY; sysopen(my $fh, $fn, $flags) || die "Can't open $fn: $!"; flock($fh, LOCK_EX) || die "Can't flock $fn: $!" if $flock_enabled +; return $fh; }

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Re: Re: Safe way to open files
by L0rdPhi1 (Sexton) on Jun 16, 2002 at 10:44 UTC
    I'm now using the below. Anyone see any problems? Should I still use truncate($fh, 0); after seek or does the sysopen take care of that?
    sub safe_open { my $fn = shift; $fn =~ s/^(>>?)//; $mode = length($1); my $flags = $mode == 1 ? O_CREAT | O_WRONLY | O_TRUNC : $mode == 2 ? O_CREAT | O_WRONLY | O_APPEND : O_RDONLY; sysopen(my $fh, $fn, $flags) or die "Can't open $fn: $!"; if ($flock_enabled) { flock($fh, LOCK_EX) or die "Can't flock $fn: $!"; } seek $fh, 0, 0; return $fh; }
      No. You do not want an unconditional seek in the routine. If it was opened with O_TRUNC or O_RDONLY it isn't needed (neither is truncate), if it was opened with O_APPEND then you definitely do not want to seek nor truncate.
        Okay! Thanks a lot++