Re^2: Why doesn't chmod work on this lexical filehandle?

in reply to Re: Why doesn't chmod work on this lexical filehandle?
in thread Why doesn't chmod work on this lexical filehandle?

...only works if your system supports chmod on file handles in general (i.e. it supports fchmod).

While this is technically correct, it's almost certainly irrelevant, as the OP is using Linux, and fchmod was introduced with kernel 0.96a almost two decades ago (when the entire kernel source tarball was just 200k).

Rather, the problem is with older versions of Perl. For example, when I strace a test script running under 5.8.4, I'm getting

chmod("*main::OUT", 0444)               = -1 ENOENT (No such file or d
+irectory)
[download]

for "chmod 0444, *OUT", and something like

chmod("GLOB(0x602210)", 0444)           = -1 ENOENT (No such file or d
+irectory)
[download]

for "chmod 0444, $OUT", while newer versions of Perl in both cases correctly do

fchmod(4, 0444)                         = 0
[download]

In other words, older versions simply passed the stringified handle to the chmod system call...

The OP's case definitely works with 5.8.8 (and newer), though.

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Re^3: Why doesn't chmod work on this lexical filehandle? by williff (Initiate) on Feb 15, 2011 at 15:45 UTC
Yes, thank you. Changing to perl 5.10.1 (latest on our network) from 5.8.0 fixed the problem. Many thanks.	[reply]

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