Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!deimos!ux1.cso.uiuc.edu!uwm.edu!ogicse!hakanson
From: hakanson@ogicse.ogi.edu (Marion Hakanson)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.perl
Subject: Re: Silent Bomb
Message-ID: <7997@ogicse.ogi.edu>
Date: 14 Mar 90 18:43:16 GMT
References: <11238@deimos.ADS.COM>
Organization: Oregon Graduate Institute (formerly OGC), Beaverton, OR
Lines: 31

In article <11238@deimos.ADS.COM> dglo@deimos.ads.com (Dave Glowacki) writes:
>I converted a shell script to a perl script and spent a couple hours
>trying to track down the following sort of error.  Is there any way
>to get error messages from a file included via 'do'?

Many people suggest:

  do 'sub.pl' || die 'error in sub.pl';

but this does not provide informative error messages.  E.g. it will not
distinguish between the file being missing and it containing a syntax
error.  So then I tried:

  do 'sub.pl' || die "Cannot load sub.pl: $!, aborted";
  die "$@aborted" if $@;

Unfortunately, the first "die" takes effect if the file exists but
contains an error, and the "$!" is gibberish in that case (the second
"die" never gets to live).  My current approach, though verbose, works
well and prints meaningful messages:

unless ( do 'sub.pl' ) {
  die "$@aborted" if $@;
  die "Cannot load sub.pl: $!, aborted";
}

I'm sure someone will convert it to a one-liner....

-- 
Marion Hakanson         Domain: hakanson@cse.ogi.edu
                        UUCP  : {hp-pcd,tektronix}!ogicse!hakanson