You wrote:

    > ### I discovered that after this line of code,
    > ### it either closes the file or redirects the 
    > ### file descriptor.
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Which line? The get_attributes line?

How did you determine this? By checking the value of fileno? If not, you could check it like this:

    print "Before: ", fileno(F), "\n";

    ....

    print "After: ", fileno(F), "\n";
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If the value changes, then your suspicion is correct. I don't think that the file has been closed, because I just tried that myself, and if the file were closed store_fd would die with the error "Not a valid file descriptor".