A stylistic advice reference is Perl Best Practices, Chapter 10 (I/O), Item 136: Always put filehandles in braces within any print statement:

It's easy to lose a lexical filehandle that's being used in the argument list of a print:

print $file $name, $rank, $serial_num, "\n";
[download]

Putting braces around the filehandle helps it stand out clearly:

print {$file} $name, $rank, $serial_num, "\n";
[download]

The braces also convey your intentions regarding that variable; namely that you really did mean it to be treated as a filehandle, and just didn't forget a comma.

An alternative syntax using IO::Handle:

use IO::Handle;
$file->print( $name, $rank, $serial_num, "\n" );
[download]