Re: perl not going to error path

[Anonymous Monk]

Non-numeric strings evaluate as zero when used in arithmetic.

$ perl -lwe 'use strict; print int "NANNY"; print int "non-numeric";'
Argument "NANNY" isn't numeric in int at -e line 1.
nan
Argument "non-numeric" isn't numeric in int at -e line 1.
0

That is to say: perl did not error out in seek() because the seek to zero offset was successful.

What is the reason for passing non-numeric offset? You will have to check the passed value yourself, or, better yet, fix the program logic to not pass a string where a number is expected!

[gupr1980]

Oh my, i thought putting the quote around the file handle works but it does not. even when i send a numeric offset putting a quote around file handle goes to die. I guess i should not put quote around file handle. So i should check to make sure that the value is numeric before passing it to seek.

hopefully there is a way to check and die if it is non numeric with a non zero exit code. I will look around. thanks

[stevieb]

"So i should check to make sure that the value is numeric before passing it to seek"

You can, yes. Doing it this way will allow you to handle the error yourself:

my $offset = 'blah';

if ($offset =~ /^[0-9]+$/){
    seek $fh, $offset, 0;
}
else {
   die "offset needs to be numeric";
}