The Cookbook (I haven't got it at hand, so I can't quote) says that a filehandle in a print statement must be a typeglob or a real scalar variable (not an indexed element of a hash/array). You can work around like you did or:

print {$self->{_handle}} "$location, $message. \n";
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I guess the gurus familiar with Perl's guts can explain why. I can't.

--bwana147