Re^2: zcat pipe gives "gzip: stdout: Broken pipe" error

[Special_K]

> In your first code you're not reading the output from zcat so it's griping because you're closing it's output handle "prematurely". If you actually read the output as when you add your while you're hitting EOF and it's happy.

True, but why does the same error not occur when I use that code in a standalone script?

> That being said it really doesn't make sense to stat the filehandle from the pipe read because that's not telling you anything about the underlying file; to get metadata about the path $myfile points to you'd just want to call stat with that path.

According to the official documentation (https://perldoc.perl.org/functions/stat), stat is called using a FILEHANDLE or DIRHANDLE, yet the examples on that page all use stat($filename). I just tested it and calling stat() on a filename returns the exact same value as calling it on an open handle to that filename. The documentation seems to have conflicting information.

[choroba]

> stat is called using a FILEHANDLE or DIRHANDLE, yet the examples on that page all use stat($filename)

If the $filehandle is associated with a real file, calling stat on it works the same as using the filename directly. But calling stat on a pipe makes no sense, as Perl has no idea what file(s) the command opens and processes.

[Special_K]

> But calling stat on a pipe makes no sense, as Perl has no idea what file(s) the command opens and processes.

I didn't realize that. In the example from my code where I call stat on the pipe opened to zcat, if I call stat() on the filename and stat() on the open pipe handle and compare the mtime values (last modified), the filename's mtime value is the last modified value as reported in Linux, but the handle's last modified value is the time the pipe was opened.