Rather than ammend that post, it's probably easier just to comment on it...

I'm no longer confused about what the intentions were with $txt = <$fh>. It's clear that it was simply reading from the filehandle (don't you just hate mondays? ;)

Anyhow, my question still stands about the overall handling of the filehandles.... Specifically this:
<code> use Otherpackage;
socket(SOCK, ....); # ... is just a bunch of args
foo(SOCK);

package Otherpackage;
sub foo {
  my $fh = shift;
  #.....
}