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Fatal(3pm)                            Perl Programmers Reference Guide                            Fatal(3pm)



NAME
       Fatal - replace functions with equivalents which succeed or die

SYNOPSIS
           use Fatal qw(open close);

           sub juggle { . . . }
           import Fatal 'juggle';

DESCRIPTION
       "Fatal" provides a way to conveniently replace functions which normally return a false value when
       they fail with equivalents which raise exceptions if they are not successful.  This lets you use
       these functions without having to test their return values explicitly on each call.  Exceptions can
       be caught using "eval{}".  See perlfunc and perlvar for details.

       The do-or-die equivalents are set up simply by calling Fatal's "import" routine, passing it the names
       of the functions to be replaced.  You may wrap both user-defined functions and overridable CORE oper-ators operators
       ators (except "exec", "system" which cannot be expressed via prototypes) in this way.

       If the symbol ":void" appears in the import list, then functions named later in that import list
       raise an exception only when these are called in void context--that is, when their return values are
       ignored.  For example

               use Fatal qw/:void open close/;

               # properly checked, so no exception raised on error
               if(open(FH, "< /bogotic") {
                       warn "bogo file, dude: $!";
               }

               # not checked, so error raises an exception
               close FH;

BUGS
       You should not fatalize functions that are called in list context, because this module tests whether
       a function has failed by testing the boolean truth of its return value in scalar context.

AUTHOR
       Lionel Cons (CERN).

       Prototype updates by Ilya Zakharevich <ilya@math.ohio-state.edu>.



perl v5.8.9                                      2001-09-21                                       Fatal(3pm)