perl equivalent of sh -e

Question

In /bin/sh and /bin/bash (and I guess a lot of other shells), starting scripts with #!/bin/sh -e (or executing set -e in someplace in the script) would cause the script to abort when any command line inside the script exits with a status code different than 0.

Is there any equivalent or workaround to get the same behavior in a perl script? (i.e. if any instruction generates an error or if any external command executed with system(...) or backticks returns error code then exit immediately)

Answer 1

Look at the autodie core module. This replaces calls like open and fork with functions that die on failure. To get it to work with system, you need to import :all or :system, since the default does not do so.

use strict;   #always!
use warnings; #always!
use autodie qw(:system);

system('/bin/false'); #This will die
print "This will never be printed\n";

It's important to note that for autodie to work with system, you need the IPC::System::Simple module. Install it with CPAN, or on Ubuntu you can sudo apt-get install libipc-system-simple-perl.