Question

Can someone explain what exactly the string ‘0 but true’ means in Perl? As far as I understand, it equals zero in an integer comparison, but evaluates to true when used as a boolean. Is this correct? Is this a normal behavior of the language or is this a special string treated as a special case in the interpreter?

Answer 1

It’s normal behaviour of the language. Quoting the perlsyn manpage:

The number 0, the strings '0' and '', the empty list (), and undef are all false in a boolean context. All other values are true. Negation of a true value by ! or not returns a special false value. When evaluated as a string it is treated as '', but as a number, it is treated as 0.

Because of this, there needs to be a way to return 0 from a system call that expects to return 0 as a (successful) return value, and leave a way to signal a failure case by actually returning a false value. '0 but true' serves that purpose.