Personally It depends on the situation. If the project is so large that I need to worry about filehandles conflicting or if I in general need to pass my filehandles around then I use autovivification.

On the other hand I recently discovered the one argument open and have started using it most of my new small scripts, mostly because it neatly packages up the variable, filehandle and die message error

our $FILE="/test/file.txt";
open FILE or die "$FILE: $!";
[download]

I can think of couple reasosn why the purist might object, but I like it, at least for ~100 line scripts. :-)

Yves
--
You are not ready to use symrefs unless you already know why they are bad. -- tadmc (CLPM)