Re: The strangest use of unlink I know of

[kyle]

I thought it might be even more tricky still. Since %foo is empty, unlink gets an empty list. I thought that might mean that it would delete whatever is in $_ as if it got no argument, but that doesn't happen.

my $test_file = 'file_of_doom';
die 'file already exists' if -e $test_file;
system( "touch $test_file" );
die 'file not created' if ! -e $test_file;

$_ = $test_file;
my %foo = ();
unlink %foo;

print "file gone!\n" if ! -e $test_file;

As it is, I think it just does nothing.

[Anonymous Monk]

Look more carefully. %foo is not empty. It was initialized with curly brackets -- almost ALWAYS a sign that the author made a mistake. Not a very humorous answer, but Wayne Jarvis is not paid to be funny.

:|

Still however -- the code indeed is a no op in terms of "useful" work. One needs to explicitly require %foo as a scalar:

unlink scalar %foo;