TL;DR

Close your handles, especially from File::Temp!

I recently wrote this code:

sub data_to_file {
   my $keep = $_[1] // 0;
   require File::Temp;
   my ($fh, $filename) = File::Temp::tempfile(UNLINK => (!$keep));
   binmode $fh, ':raw';
   print {$fh} ref($_[0]) ? ${$_[0]} : $_[0];
   return $filename;
} ## end sub data_to_file

It’s part of Data::Resolver, which I released but only to make CPAN Testers take note of it. And, well, use it elsewhere.

What’s wrong with it? At least a couple of things:

• the print might fail, but I happily skip over it
• I don’t close the $fh filehandle, nor check the closing operation (of course).

This is usually not a problem, because these operations “rarely” fail in a hobbyst’s scenario, plus Perl closes filehandle when they go out of scope.

Anyway, it hit me quite hard recently because I was getting truncated data back. I suspect that getting a filehandle from File::Temp means that it’s not closed automatically when it goes out of scope in my function, hence the issue.

So well, yeah: a buffering-related problem.

Which reminded me of the excellent article [Suffering from Buffering][] by Mark Jason Dominus - the true inspiration for this post’s title and most importantly a recommended read!

Stay safe!