For completeness, good ol' merlyn's classic Perl Best Practices slideshare:

• 10.1 Filehandles (slide 136)
• 10.2 Indirect Filehandles (slide 137)
• 10.3 Localizing Filehandles (slide 138)
• 10.4 Opening Cleanly (slide 139)

gives some excellent advice:

• Don't use bareword filehandles: can't easily pass them around; can't easily localize them; can't make them "go out of scope".
• Use indirect filehandles: they close automatically; can be passed to/from subroutines; can be stored in aggregates; might need readline or print {  } though - e.g. my $line = readline $inputs[3]; print { $output_for{$day} } @list;
• Localizing filehandles: if you must use a package filehandle localize it; local *HANDLE; beware this also stomps on other package items ... so use it sparingly ... that's why indirect handles are better.
• Opening cleanly: use IO::File or 3-arg open.

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