http://www.perlmonks.org?node_id=575858


in reply to Re^2: Is this the most elegant way to code directory lookup?
in thread Is this the most elegant way to code directory lookup?

Update: Looks like I'm wrong.

I disagree: just because someone tried it once and got a useful error message doesn't change the fact that $! is not documented to be defined at this point.

$! may well get set differently (or not at all) in different circumstances, when testing different files, or on a different O/S, or depending on phase of the moon for all we know.

Your suggested clearer error messages are definitively more correct; the only change I might make (at the risk of getting too clever) is to avoid the duplication with something like:

die "$_ is not a valid directory\n" for grep !-d, $srcdir, $destdir;

Hugo