Today I had to whip up a quick script, which typically makes me nervous, and I noticed something that to my still-baby-Perl eyes seemed ... well, interesting, I guess.

I had to create some reports from a couple of tab-delimited text files, so as I usually do, I opened filehandles to them:

open (my $INFILE_1, '<', 'name_o_file.txt') ||
    croak "Cannot open input file: $!\n";
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... and same deal for a second file / handle.

I then created subroutines to create the reports, and tried passing the filehandles into the subroutines. It worked fine for the first subroutine, but when I passed the same filehandles to a SECOND subroutine ... nothing happened. No output. It was as though I had not called that second subroutine at all.

I only explicitly closed the filehandles after the second subroutine call.

Just because I got desperate, I tried creating TWO MORE filehandles to the same files, and passing those to the second subroutine. This worked.

What is happening here? Do filehandles get auto-closed when they are passed to a subroutine and the subroutine returns?

(this is probably really basic, but somehow I have never encountered it before).

UPDATE: of course, I should _think_ before I post (and post code as well)

Here is what doesn't work:

open(my $CDA1, '<', 'cda1_raw.txt') ||
    croak "Cannot open input file 1: $!\n";

open(my $CDA2, '<', 'cda2_raw.txt') ||
    croak "Cannot open input file 2: $!\n";

report_one($CDA1, 'cda1_boffle.txt');
report_one($CDA2, 'cda2_boffle.txt');

report_two($CDA1, $CDA2, $dbh);

close $CDA1;
close $CDA2;
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And here is what worked:

open(my $CDA1, '<', 'cda1_raw.txt') ||
    croak "Cannot open input file 1: $!\n";
open(my $CDA2, '<', 'cda2_raw.txt') ||
    croak "Cannot open input file 2: $!\n";

report_one($CDA1, 'cda1_boffle.txt');
report_one($CDA2, 'cda2_boffle.txt');

open(my $CDA3, '<', 'cda1_raw.txt') ||
    croak "Cannot open input file: $!\n";
open(my $CDA4, '<', 'cda2_raw.txt') ||
    croak "Cannot open input file: $!\n";

report_three ($CDA3, $CDA4, $dbh);

close $CDA1;
close $CDA2;
close $CDA3;
close $CDA4;
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sub report_one {

        my ($input_handle, $output_name) = @_;

    open(my $OUT, '>', "$output_name") ||
            croak "Cannot open output file: $!\n";

        my $current_host = "";
        my %host_counts;

        my @rows = (<$input_handle>);

    foreach ( @rows ) {
                my ($date, $time, $host, $bytes, $bytes_sec, $server) 
+= split /\t/;

                if ( ( $bytes < 1000000 ) || ( $bytes == $bytes_sec ) 
+) {
                        next;
                }

                if ( $host eq $current_host ) {
                        $host_counts{$host}{bytes} += $bytes;
                        $host_counts{$host}{speed} += $bytes_sec;
                        $host_counts{$host}{count}++;

                } else {
                        $host_counts{$host}{bytes} = $bytes;
                        $host_counts{$host}{speed} = $bytes_sec;
                        $host_counts{$host}{count} = 1;

                }
                $current_host = $host;
        }

    foreach my $heauxst ( keys %host_counts ){
                my $avg_speed = int( $host_counts{$heauxst}{speed} / $
+host_counts{$heauxst}{count} );
                print $OUT "$heauxst\t$host_counts{$heauxst}{bytes}\t$
+avg_speed\n";
        }

        close $OUT;
        return;
}
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