I'd forgotten just how much good advice there is in the Cookbook. I'm pounding on ch07 now, and this involves looking closely at every word (because filehandles have changed more than, say, the CGI module). I just noticed and remembered the advice about choosing file permissions with sysopen (it's on page 228 for those of you following along at home).
Basically, use 0666 for regular files and 0777 for directories. This because the user can always remove permissions they don't want by setting their umask, but there's no way to be more permissive than the program's hard-coded value. So give the user choice, but don't take it away.
This was Tom's advice--I wasn't particularly umask-clueful when we were writing the book. He really pushed me to learn exactly what it was and how it worked. Ah, good days.
This, thankfully, is one thing that won't have to be updated for these heady 5.6 and 5.8 days!
We've had a long to-and-fro about the virtues of retaining bareword FILEHANDLE syntax versus going with the new $fh filehandle-as-variable syntax made possible by:
open $fh, ...I'm the progressive force, as I was on the old Cookbook, always arguing for the new stuff. He's the traditionalist, able to muster a million arguments why the new stuff is crap :-) He won on this not because $fh is necessarily worse than FH, but because we've used $THING in snippets to indicate a variable or value that you'd need to initialize before you can use the snippet. It makes sense to retain that uppercase convention, and it seems silly to add a $ to filehandles in hundreds of snippets without any compelling reason.
I have to say, though, that I'm in love with
open $fh, ...I love being able to lexically scope my filehandles. (ha, get it? "my" filehandles? Oh I kill me). And the new three-argument form of open kicks ass. You can read/write to strings with the builtin open now, for pete's sake!
open $fh, "<", \$stringNow that's making easy things easy.
--Nat
Something about that inlined my makes me feel funny!open my $fh, $file;
Globals bite (in both senses
More advice about Perl systems programming is always desirable (I'm writing several perl daemons these days).
Also, I'm with the CPAN King: 644 those files! If I'm charitable: 664 (I guess I can trust lusers in my group).
Remember, ssh doesn't like identity files group and other readable bits set. That's paranoid! My attitude is merely cranky in comparison.
Doing it this way also made it unnecessary to start another process. (Is it too late to get this in the book?BEGIN {
if ($^O eq 'MSWin32') {
require Win32::Console;
Win32::Console::Free();
}
}
