Programming Perl, 4th Edition

Per-Package Special Functions

The following subroutine names have a special meaning to Perl. They’re always called implicitly because of some event, such as accessing a tied variable or trying to call an undefined function. We don’t describe them in this chapter since they all receive heavy-duty coverage elsewhere in the book.

Undefined function call interceptor (see Chapter 10):

AUTOLOAD

Moribund objects’ finalization (see Chapter 12):

DESTROY

Exception objects (see die in Chapter 27):

PROPAGATE

Auto-init and auto-cleanup functions (see Chapter 16):

BEGIN, CHECK, UNITCHECK, INIT, END

Threading support:

CLONE, CLONE_SKIP

Tie methods (see Chapter 14):

BINMODE, CLEAR, CLOSE, DELETE, DESTROY, EOF, EXISTS, EXTEND,
FETCH, FETCHSIZE, FILENO, FIRSTKEY, GETC, NEXTKEY, OPEN, POP,
PRINT, PRINTF, PUSH, READ, READLINE, SCALAR, SEEK, SHIFT,
SPLICE, STORE, STORESIZE, TELL, TIEARRAY, TIEHANDLE, TIEHASH,
TIESCALAR, UNSHIFT, and WRITE.