Hi Venki.

What is a file handle?
A file handle is a way to associate a file with a 'handle'. In other words, you 'interact' with the file *through* the file handle.

You could use a file handle like this:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;

open( FH, ">myFile.txt" ) or die( "Oops! : $!\n" );

...code...

close FH;
[download]

The code above will try to open the file 'myFile.txt' for writing but if it cannot, it will print the word Oops! followed by the reason for the failure ( which is stored in the special $! variable ).
I'm not sure what you mean by a 'normal file open'. On *nix or BSD? Windows? It would most likely be platform dependent. Using a file handle is a very powerful tool for a perl programmer. They permit us to open, close, print to, read from, etc. various files on our local machines or those across networks.

More info can be found here:

perldoc -f open

Hope this helps,

-Katie.