Isn't it at least theoretically possible for close to return an error?

Abigail

Granted. With respect to the OP's case of reading a file, but I took Aristotle to mean that he advises using locally scoped lexical file handles for the general case.

I can't honestly claim that I usually check the return from close even on writable files. Little I'm doing is that critical at the moment, but I was wondering how you could handle the possibility of the error occuring with autoclosed filehandles?

As I said, I'm not sure it would be possible to do much about it beyond logging the fact that a failure had occured, but that could be important for tracking down failures in critical applications. I just can't see a way to go about it when auto-closing lexical handles.

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Examine what is said, not who speaks.
"Efficiency is intelligent laziness." -David Dunham
"Think for yourself!" - Abigail
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I almost always check the return value of close on handles that I have open for writing. There's usually not much you can do to recover, but I like my programs to die screaming instead of silently going down. Perhaps the most common cause of a close failure is when the filesystem is full. If that happens, I want to know it right away.

I certainly wouldn't autoclose filehandles that I have open for writing, because I want to inspect the return value of close. And save from writing some XS code, I don't think you detect a close failure if your handle autocloses. Perhaps setting $! to 0 just before leaving the scope, and inspecting $! right afterwards might work, but other variables can go out of scope, causing $! to be set.

Abigail