I seem to have found a bug in perl's support for opening file handles to scalar variables (so-called in memory files), but I wanted to make sure I wasn't doing something stupid. Could folks try out the following test code? The problem happens with perl 5.8.6 on MacOS X 10.4 and on Solaris 2.7. In the test code, I first open STDOUT to a variable and then open STDERR to STDOUT. All output to STDOUT makes it to the variable, but output to STDERR doesn't; that is, the test code prints out 
testing stdout capture 1
testing stdout capture 2
Is this a bug in perl 5.8.6? 
#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;                                               
use FileHandle;                                            
                                                                    
open SAVED_STDOUT, ">&STDOUT" or die "couldn't save STDOUT: $!\n"; 
open SAVED_STDERR, ">&STDERR" or die "couldn't save STDERR: $!\n"; 
 
print SAVED_STDOUT "";  # to suppress warning about possible typo 
 
my $captured_output = ""; 
 
close STDOUT; 
open STDOUT, ">", \$captured_output or die "couldn't re-open STDOUT: $
+!\n"; 
 
close STDERR; 
open STDERR, ">&STDOUT" or die "couldn't re-open STDERR: $!\n"; 
 
print "testing stdout capture 1\n"; 
print STDERR "testing stderr capture\n"; 
print "testing stdout capture 2\n"; 
 
close STDOUT; open STDOUT, ">&SAVED_STDOUT"; 
close STDERR; open STDERR, ">&SAVED_STDERR"; 
 
print STDERR $captured_output, "\n";

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In reply to possible bug in opening file handle to variable by youngh

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