We don't need the close - the filehandle will automatically be closed when it falls out of scope.

Actually that is wrong. FILE globs are not locally scoped.

C:\>type test.pl
sub open_file_handle { open FILE, ">c:/test.txt" or die $! }
open_file_handle();
print FILE "This file handle is not closed!" or die $!

C:\>perl test.pl

C:\>type test.txt
This file handle is not closed!
C:\>
[download]

If you really feel that not explicitly closing your filehandles is good programming practice and want to depend on Perl doing it for you you need to use

open my $fh, $file or die $!;
[download]

From memory this is only valid for Perl 5.6+

cheers

tachyon

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