the black art of Perl

Saturday, August 14, 1999, at 11:27AM

By Eric Richardson

I'm working on a Perl script for Gospelcom that has to be written suid root. The more I do with it, the more I'm becoming convinced that writing suid Perl stuff is really akin to black magic. Take this for example: I've got a bail routine that uses sendmail to email the admin when something fails. The bail routine gets called perfectly, yet no email is sent out. No errors appear anywhere. The code just seemingly disappears into a black hole. Really, really, weird.