Use a lexical filehandle and pass it back, it behaves just as a scalar.

$ cat > rubbish
sdfhi
rtrthr
dgdf
$ perl -Mstrict -Mwarnings -e '
> my $file = q{rubbish};
> my $fh = openFunc( $file );
> print while <$fh>;
> 
> sub openFunc
> {
>     my $fileToOpen = shift;
>     open my $fileHandle, q{<}, $fileToOpen
>        or die qq{open: $fileToOpen: $!\n};
>     return $fileHandle;
> }'
sdfhi
rtrthr
dgdf
$

[download]

I hope this was what you meant from your rather terse question and that I have answered your question.

Cheers,

JohnGG

In reply to Re: return file descriptor from function by johngg
in thread return file descriptor from function by solomon243

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