#2573: Cactus treats a directory "configs/FOO/ThornList" as an empty thornlist file

Reporter: Roland Haas Status: new Milestone: Version: development version Type: bug Priority: minor Component: Cactus

Perl lets one open a directory with the regular `open` command but then reports no content in it ie it shows up as an empty file. Eg.

```perl #!/usr/bin/perl

use strict; use warnings;

open(my $FH, "<", "empty") or die; print "$FH\n"; while(<$FH>) { print $_; } close $FH; ```

will work without error after a `mkdir empty`.

The suggested solution seems to be to use Perl’s `-f` operator to check for file type first. Eg something like:

```perl -f "empty" && open(my $FH, "<", "empty") or die; ```

which I verified to fail if empty is a directory or a symbolic link to a directory but works fine for files and symbolic links to files.

This actually happened to someone “in the wild”, so it not quite hypothetical.

-- Ticket URL: https://bitbucket.org/einsteintoolkit/tickets/issues/2573/cactus-treats-a-di...