The obvious you're missing is that 
    print OUT;

[download]
is just relying on yet another perl Do-What-I-Mean feature. The bareword OUT happens to be a filehandle, and the statement resolves to a bare print statement (to that filehandle). A bare print results in printing $_.

In fact, a bareword after print is always interpreted as a filehandle1, no matter if it exists: 

$ perl -wle 'print OUT'
Name "main::OUT" used only once: possible typo at -e line 1.
print() on unopened filehandle OUT at -e line 1.

[download]
With indirect filehandles that isn't the case: here the filehandle is a scalar holding a reference to a glob. Perl can't figure out what you mean (and imho ought not, anyways), so your variable's content gets printed. Only with print $expr LIST inspection of $expr is done.

<update>
 

$ perl -wle 'print $fh'
Name "main::fh" used only once: possible typo at -e line 1.
Use of uninitialized value in print at -e line 1.

$ perl -wle 'print $fh $bar'
Name "main::bar" used only once: possible typo at -e line 1.
Name "main::fh" used only once: possible typo at -e line 1.
Can't use an undefined value as a symbol reference at -e line 1.

[download]

Only in the latter case perl tries to resolve $fh to a filehandle.

1) unless your bareword is a constant as in 

$ perl -wle 'use constant OUT => "foo";print OUT'
foo

[download]
</update>

--shmem 

_($_=" "x(1<<5)."?\n".q·/)Oo.  G°\        /
                              /\_¯/(q    /
----------------------------  \__(m.====·.(_("always off the crowd"))."·
");sub _{s./.($e="'Itrs `mnsgdq Gdbj O`qkdq")=~y/"-y/#-z/;$e.e && print}

In reply to Re: Bareword vs. Indirect Filehandle behaviour by shmem
in thread Bareword vs. Indirect Filehandle behaviour by johngg

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