It is also an enormous speed hit, and you can already do that, either by using Symbol and then calling gensym, or with the following: 
my $fh = do {local *FH};
my $file = "foo.txt";
open ($fh, "> $file") or die "Cannot write '$file': $!";
print $fh "Hello world\n";

[download]
And yes, you can keep filehandles in arrays, etc.

But note that if you try to abuse this, you could run out of filehandles in your program. If lots of programs all open lots of filehandles, you could run out of filehandles on your machine. So it is best to not leave a million of these open...

In reply to RE (tilly) 2: Variable Filehandles by tilly
in thread Variable Filehandles by Anonymous Monk

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.