Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!clyde.concordia.ca!uunet!etnibsd!vsh
From: vsh@etnibsd.UUCP (Steve Harris)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.perl
Subject: quasi-bug
Message-ID: <1121@etnibsd.UUCP>
Date: 26 Mar 90 20:30:54 GMT
Organization: Eaton Corp, Semiconductor Equipment Div., Beverly, MA
Lines: 27

I finally got around to upgrading to patch level 15 (from level 2) and,
while running the test suite, discovered an interesting problem:
in the test "op.stat", there is code that basically does:

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
chdir '/usr/bin';
while (<*>) {
	# increment some counters, etc.
}
# if (counter not incremented) { print error message; }
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

which kept failing on my system.  I inserted a couple print statements
and discovered the main loop was not being entered!  It looked like
file name globbing was broken!  A few more tests showed this failure
happened in the /usr/bin directory only.

Well, to make a long story short, there existed a file in /usr/bin
named 0.  That's right, the single digit zero.  So it seems that the
first time into the loop, the while test failed, i.e., the value
returned by <*> was being interpreted as a numeric, not a string
value!

Now, regardless of the fact that a file named 0 probably does not
belong in /usr/bin, is this the way the <*> construct should work???
-- 
Steve Harris - Eaton Corp. - Beverly, MA - uunet!etnibsd!vsh