It's not something I thought of because nearly all of my scripts only read other files and write results to STDOUT.

But it doesn't invalidate the approach, as even if I have to check the return value of close, I'll just put the check at the bottom of the scope. A pity that there's no more declarative way to do the check, but anyway.

If anything, it can still be argued to be better than not using a scope in two ways: a) it reinforces a difference compared to read-only accesses (which won't have a close anywhere) and b) you cannot forget to close the filehandle even if you forget to check whether it was closed properly.