Gentle beings!

My perl 5.8.8 on SunOS' version of perldata claims:

All functions that are capable of creating filehandles (...) automatically create an anonymous filehandle if the handle passed to them is an uninitialized scalar variable.
Imagine, if you will, my consternation at encountering the following error:
Use of uninitialized value at releases.pl line 63.
Can't use an undefined value as filehandle reference at releases.pl li
+ne 63.

[download]
in response to this code snippet: 

sub RLS_ropen($) {
    (@_ == 1) || die "RLS_ropen called w/ invalid argument list: ".sca
+lar(@_)." params instead of 1";
    my $name = $_[0];

    unless ( $name ) {
        # invalid - null or empty file name
        return "";
    }

    unless ( -e $name && -r $name ) {
        # file doesn't exits or is unreadable
        return "";
    }

    open( my $dbh, "< $name");
    return $dbh;
}   # end RLS_ropen

[download]
where line 63 is (of course) open( my $dbh, "< $name"); almost straight out of the perldoc example.

Please, someone, anyone, unperplex me!

In reply to Uninitialized filehandles not as advertised?! by Eli-Sko

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