Which makes it dangerous in the hands of naive users who interrupt a program with CTRL-C, then re-run it. If they do that, they may suffer permanent data loss and without being aware of it.
To quote Oscar Wilde's Miss Prism: "What a lesson for him! I trust he will profit by it."
;-)
It seems to me that you can get re-runnability with little extra effort: simply write the temporary file first and only overwrite the original (via atomic rename) after the temporary has been successfully written.
The IO::Insitu module could certainly be reworked to operate that way. Except that then would fail to preserve the inode of the original file.
:-(. Perhaps I will add an option to allow it to work whichever way (i.e. "inode-preserving" vs "rerunnable") the user prefers.
Bear in mind though that an "atomic rename" isn't really atomic under most filesystems, so even this approach still isn't going to absolutely guarantee rerunnability.