[tpm] IO::Handle not catching errors

[Madison Kelly]

Thanks for replying! I'll address your questions in-line. :)

James E Keenan wrote:
> On May 26, 2008, at 3:45 PM, Madison Kelly wrote:
>>    I use IO::Handle for shell calls,
> 
> Why?

A couple years ago I was having trouble with some IPC stuff clobbering 
"traditional" filehandles. I found that the 'Filehandle' module off CPAN 
solved those problems. However, 'Filehandle' is not a core module, and 
so expecting a user to have it could cause dependency problems. So I did 
some looking and, perhaps incorrectly, realized that IO::Handle looked 
to do the same thing and was a core module, so using it seemed to solved 
the clobbering problem and not have the dependency problem.

Since then, I've made a habit of using it everywhere.

> When I call 'perldoc IO::Handle', among the first things I read is:
> 
> "It is not intended that objects of "IO::Handle" would be created  
> directly, but instead "IO::Handle" is inherited from by several other  
> classes in the IO hierarchy."
> 
> Your example does not suggest that you are inheriting from IO::Handle.
> 
> Above and beyond that, you do not appear to be calling it in an  
> object-oriented way.  You create the IO::Handle object:
> 
>> 	print "  Shell call: [$shell_call]\n";
> 
> ... and then proceed to use it as the second argument to a Perl built- 
> in 'open' function, where one would normally expect something like '<':
> 
>> 	open ($sc, $shell_call) or die "Shell call: [$shell_call] failed with
>> error: $!";
> 
> On what basis do you expect the preceding statement to do something  
> useful?

This catch works... Say for example if the '$shell_call' had a bad path 
to an executable, or if it lacked permissions, it would trigger 'die' 
and properly exit.

> You don't appear to call a method on your IO::Handle object until here:
> 
> 
>> 	if ($sc->error)
>> 	{
>> 		die "Shell call: [$shell_call] returned an error: $!";
>> 	}
>> 	$sc->close;
>>
> 
> I'm unclear as to what you're intending to do, but I suspect  
> IO::Handle is not the way to do it.  Can you clarify?
> 
> Thank you very much.
> Jim Keenan

As I (probably incorrectly) understood the docs, the '$sc->error' should 
be set if the called shell program ran properly but returned a non-zero 
exit code (because something it was supposed to do didn't work).

In my current program, for example, I am calling 'rpm' to install a 
package. The call the the 'rpm' binary works, so the first 'die' doesn't 
trigger, but the 'rpm' binary itself exits with a non-zero code because 
the RPM I was trying to install failed due to dependency issues. That is 
was I want to trap.

Madi