Re^2: Practical example of "Is Perl code maintainable"

[xdg]

There is "readable" and then there is "rambling and confusing"

++

At the cost of using a module, I'd go a bit further if readability were really the goal.

use File::stat qw(stat);

sub file_mode {
  my ($path) = @_;
  -f $path or return -1;
  my $stat = stat($path) or return -1;
  return $stat->mode;
}

That's assuming I didn't have permission to replace whatever was calling file_mode with File::stat in the first place. Something is calling file_mode, storing the result, checking for -1, etc., etc. That part is probably just as crufty.

Update: ysth pointed out that I omitted '-f', so I re-wrote the code to be more explicit.