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If unimplemented, raises an exception. The arguments are interpreted as follows: if a given argument is numeric, the argument is passed as an int. If not, the pointer to the string value is passed. You are responsible to make sure a string is pre-extended long enough to receive any result that might be written into a string. You can't use a string literal (or other read-only string) as an argument to <code>syscall</code> because Perl has to assume that any string pointer might be written through. If your integer arguments are not literals and have never been interpreted in a numeric context, you may need to add <code>0</code> to them to force them to look like numbers. This emulates the <code>syswrite</code> function (or vice versa):</p> <pre><code>require 'syscall.ph'; # may need to run h2ph $s = "hi there\n"; syscall(&SYS_write, fileno(STDOUT), $s, length $s);</code></pre> <p>Note that Perl supports passing of up to only 14 arguments to your syscall, which in practice should (usually) suffice.</p> <p>Syscall returns whatever value returned by the system call it calls. If the system call fails, <code>syscall</code> returns <code>-1</code> and sets <code>$!</code> (errno). Note that some system calls <i>can</i> legitimately return <code>-1</code>. The proper way to handle such calls is to assign <code>$!=0</code> before the call, then check the value of <code>$!</code> if <code>syscall</code> returns <code>-1</code>.</p> <p>There's a problem with <code>syscall(&SYS_pipe)</code>: it returns the file number of the read end of the pipe it creates, but there is no way to retrieve the file number of the other end. You can avoid this problem by using <code>pipe</code> instead.</p> <p>Portability issues: <a href="/5.18.2/perlport#syscall">"syscall" in perlport</a>.</p> </dd> </dl> </div> <div id="footer"> <p>Perldoc Browser is maintained by Dan Book (<a href="https://metacpan.org/author/DBOOK">DBOOK</a>). Please contact him via the <a href="https://github.com/Grinnz/perldoc-browser/issues">GitHub issue tracker</a> or <a href="mailto:dbook@cpan.org">email</a> regarding any issues with the site itself, search, or rendering of documentation.</p> <p>The Perl documentation is maintained by the Perl 5 Porters in the development of Perl. 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