Well hopefully we will have error messages that also includes the filename and the contents of $!. (Like perlstyle says to do.)

But lexically scoped filehandles have something to say for them. And you can even do it in Perl 5.005. Consider: 

use Carp;
# time passes

# Takes a name to open, returns an open filehandle
sub my_open {
  my $file = shift;
  # Put the declaration in the open to confuse people? :-)
  my $fh = do {local *FH};
  open($fh, $file) or confess("Cannot open '$file': $!");
  return $fh;
}

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There you are. Now you can just write: 
  my $handle = my_open("whatever");

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and you will have lexically scoped filehandles. The only gotcha is that people may get confused about why they cannot use them like this: 
  print $self->{handle} @stuff;

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but instead must either put the handle in a scalar, turn print into a method call, or use the syntactic trick: 
  print { $self->{handle} } @stuff;

[download]

In reply to Re (tilly) 1: auto-vivifying file handles by tilly
in thread auto-vivifying file handles by John M. Dlugosz

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