In probably 99% of Perl code, you only need to know two cryptic symbols: $! for errno and $? for child-process exit status. And if you're programming in shell now, you're already using $?.
Yes, there are symbols for handling autoflush on handles, input/output record separators, etc. But rarely will you need to use these items. In fact, we have methods for handling these situations for quite some time now.
For instance, to unbuffer your output you'd use $|, but now you just use $filehandle->autoflush(1). Another example would be undefining the input record separator so that you could pull in an entire file with one read, but now that's handled via Slurp::slurp_file.
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In probably 99% of Perl code, you only need to know two cryptic symbols: $! for errno and $? for child-process exit status. And if you're programming in shell now, you're already using $?.
Yes, there are symbols for handling autoflush on handles, input/output record separators, etc. But rarely will you need to use these items. In fact, we have methods for handling these situations for quite some time now.
For instance, to unbuffer your output you'd use $|, but now you just use $filehandle->autoflush(1). Another example would be undefining the input record separator so that you could pull in an entire file with one read, but now that's handled via Slurp::slurp_file.