Odd open but no warning

[Colin Campbell]

Recently I had to look at a perl script which was misbehaving. When I looked
at it the code was pretty horrific, among other horrors was the following

open FH, "|$external_program|";
print FH "command";
$response = <FH>;

What surprised me was that this compiled without even a warning.
I wondered if there was ever a use for such an apparently mistaken
construction?

Any views?
(Other than someone should buy the author the llama book for Xmas)
Colin

 

[Colin Campbell]

See the docs for open() and IPC::Open2, which explain a bit about this.

Not really the question I was trying to ask. (I'd already replaced it
with Open2 while cursing its author). But, the answer is that you only
get the warning when running with warnings, not by doing a compile with
warnings. (Hangs head in shame as he should of tried that before
posting).
Colin

 

[Bob Walton]

Not really the question I was trying to ask. (I'd already replaced it
with Open2 while cursing its author). But, the answer is that you only
get the warning when running with warnings, not by doing a compile with
warnings. (Hangs head in shame as he should of tried that before
posting).
Colin

Well, one of the things I was trying to say is that at compile time, all
the compiler checks for is a syntactically valid string for the second
argument of open(). Any string will suffice for compilation purposes.
It is only when execution is attempted that the string is evaluated and
the open is actually attempted to see if it works or not. Any garbagy
string will compile:

perl -wc -e 'open X,"|||~!@#$%^&*()_+|||" or die;print X "a"'

will nicely output

-e syntax OK