I have been working my way through several sections of Peter Wainwright's "Pro Perl." I was, in particular, interested in his approach to redirecting Perl's STDOUT and STDERR filehandles. I entered his code (see below) and got an odd result that I don't understand and, after researching it, can't find any indication of what is going on.

Here is the code snippet:

open(OLDOUT, "> &STDOUT");

my $logfile = 'MyLearn01_log.txt';
open(STDOUT, "> $logfile");

select STDOUT;

<...do whatever printing to the new STDOUT...>

close(STDOUT); open(STDOUT, "> &OLDOUT);

[download]

When I run this snippet I found that a file &STDOUT had been created, as well as the $logfile, MyLearn01_log.txt.

I understand, of course, why the logfile was created. But I don't understand why the file, &STDOUT, was created.

The book doesn't say anything about it (in fact my read is that no such thing should have happened).

I am running version 5.8.8.819 of ActiveState's Perl (I haven't upgraded to 5.10 yet since my IDE doesn't yet support it) under Windows XP.

Does anyone know why &SDTOUT is created?

DarkLord1 Looking for Redemption in the Monastery

In reply to "Pro Perl's" Redirecting Filehandles - Unexpected Result by DarkLord1

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