That is genius! Thank you so much for this :)

I appreciate everyone's patience with me on this over the last month or so. Digging through all the docs was informative, but just a tad overwhelming trying to piece it all together which led to confusion.

When it was pointed out that a scalar ref is NOT a file and the two are treated in different ways helped a lot.

In this round, my goal was an anonymous temp file for which I had gone on to use File::Temp which I felt was a bit heavy-handed. I'm very surprised I never came across the link you shared in my travels.

Cheers everyone,

-stevieb

Yeah, but that way of creating temporary files doesn't even honor $ENV{TMPDIR} (at least in some configurations), which makes it one of the worst ways to make temporary files in Perl in my book. I was rather shocked when I discovered such in the Perl source code (trying to figure out why Plack temporary files were being put into the wrong directory).

- tye        

trying to figure out why Plack temporary files were being put into the wrong directory

On recent linux system you can find out the original location of the deleted file by examining /proc:

qwurx [shmem] ~> perl
open $fh, "+>", undef or die "Can't create anonymous storage: $!";
$file = "/proc/$$/fd/" . fileno $fh;
print "$file => ", readlink( $file ), $/;
__END__
/proc/26628/fd/3 => /tmp/PerlIO_eVAtFg (deleted)
[download]

On systems which lack /proc/$$/fd it can be quite annoying to find out, specially when the file system is full and a process is just sitting around in IOWAIT. In this condition there's a difference between disk usage of device and file system. Found that on an old Solaris server running a program which employed this trick: create file, get handle, unlink. Took me some time to find out.

perl -le'print map{pack c,($-++?1:13)+ord}split//,ESEL'