Re: "close" failing

[jesuashok]

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[derby]

That's not really a wait issue. When closing a piped open filehandle, if the opened command exits with a non-zero and that's the only issue with the command, then $! is set to 0. So the code above is using the tertiary operater to check that condition. I thought that might be the issue too but the OP said it worked fine from the command line so more than likely there's either a path or permisssion issue.

[liverpole]

The code jesuashok posted was simply copied verbatim from the example section of perldoc entry for close, even to the point of including the comment containing the ellipses "#...":

    open(OUTPUT, '|sort >foo')  # pipe to sort
        or die "Can't start sort: $!";
    #...            # print stuff to output
    close OUTPUT        # wait for sort to finish
        or warn $! ? "Error closing sort pipe: $!"
                   : "Exit status $? from sort";
    open(INPUT, 'foo')        # get sort's results
        or die "Can't open 'foo' for input: $!";

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