Another great alternatives for making temporary filehandles is IO::File's new_tmpfile() method.

I prefer to use this method when their is no need to know the name of the file. In fact, IO::File hides these implementation details from you completly, and very nicely I might add. It Does the Right Thing with respect to security, file permissions and the naming of the file to ensure there is no "filename collisions".

Here's a quick example to illustrate how close it is compared to standard IO::File handle:

use IO::File;

my $temp_fh = IO::File->new_tmpfile
  or die "Could not open a temporary file: $!";

#Save some stuff in the file handle
$temp_fh->print('this stuff to the file handle');

#Rewind to the beginning
$temp_fh->seek(0, 0); 

#It can do anything that a normal IO::File file handle can
while(my $line = <$temp_fh>) {
  print $line;   #prints 'this stuff to the file handle'
}
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I find temp files are really useful if you need to do alot of processing on large files/strings, and you can't do all the processing in memory.

Here you will see a real-world example of IO::File's new_tmpfile() method in action. I wrote this example to show an interesting way to prepend any string to a filehandle.