The reason I ask is that I've written a common module for use in my scripts which attempts to cleanup any open file or directory handles before the script exits. This means that I have methods like openFile() which pushes the filehandle into an array which I can then iterate over at a later point (i.e when cleanup() is called) to ensure that the filehandle was indeed closed.

For example:

sub openFile {
        my ($filename, $mode) = @_;
        use FileHandle;
        my $filehandle = FileHandle->new($filename,$mode);
        if (defined $filehandle) {
                push(@openedFileHandles, $filehandle);
                return $filehandle;
        }
        return 0;
}
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and I open my files like

my $logfile = openFile("application.log",">>");
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From reading various nodes on perlmonks, I picked up that I can check if a filehandle is open/present by using fileno(), so this lets me do something like

foreach my $filehandle (@openedFileHandles) {
        if (fileno($filehandle)) {
                $filehandle->close();
        }
}
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when I'm cleaning up.

But I get the impression that fileno() doesn't work for directory handles. If that is the case, how can I check if a directory handle is still open or present?

I'm opening directories in a similar fashion to openFile(), except using DirHandle instead of FileHandle

Any thoughts appreciated. Actually, if anyone has any suggestions on what a good cleanup module should do, or whether there is something like this already available, that'd also be extremely helpful information.