my intuition from C, where filehandles are NULL when fopen fails

That's because fopen returns the "file handle": it can only use that to indicate an error, all the arguments are const. C has no choice. If you think about it, perl open returning false on error is the same as C fopen, which also returns false on error.

In reply to Re: Filehandles when Open Fails by cdarke
in thread Filehandles when Open Fails by Anonymous Monk

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