I don't know why people are telling you to use the IO modules. Personally I don't like the IO modules. Just remember that you have to actually put the filehandle into a variable before reading from it, and it is actually quite simple to have an array of filehandles. (If you use something more complex Perl will get confused and think it is a glob pattern or an expression.) See RE (tilly) 1: Merging files for a working example that does something useful.

Warning, there is usually a hard limit on how many filehandles you may have open. Often it is only a few hundred. Caveat programmer.

Trivia, in there I use Symbol so I can call gensym(). If you don't want to use the magic call to gensym(), on 5.6 the handle will create itself upon demand (ie it autovivifies), and in earlier Perl's you can do this: 

  my $fh = do {local *FOO};

[download]
to get the same effect.

In reply to Re (tilly) 1: returning filehandles by tilly
in thread returning filehandles by DeusVult

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.