From perldoc perlopentut

If you want the convenience of the shell, then Perl's open is definitely the way to go. On the other hand, if you want finer precision than C's simplistic fopen(3S) provides, then you should look to Perl's sysopen, which is a direct hook into the open(2) system call. That does mean it's a bit more involved, but that's the price of precision.

In this case, I just don't see the justification for using sysopen instead of regular open. It doesn't make much of a difference either way. When I review someone else's code and see where they use sysopen, alarms usually go off in my head and I immediately attempt to determine why they'd use it. But still, it doesn't matter either way.

Hope this helps.