Not trying to do anything "useful" here, just experimenting with Perl a bit. I read in Intermediate Perl (p. 146) that the print function (as well as many of the built-in operations on filehandles) are actually just using Perl's indirect object notation to call the print method on the filehandle object.

So, I was curious to see whether this worked with the standard filehandles; STDOUT in particular. However:

my $ofh = *STDOUT;
$ofh->print("test 1\n");

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didn't work. Nor did:

my $ofh = \*STDOUT;
$ofh->print("test 2\n");

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or even (not that I expected this to):

STDOUT->print("test 3\n");

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So, what gives? I checked perlfaq5, IO::Handle, and perldata but didn't see anything that answered my question specifically. Is there something I'm doing wrong or are the STD* filehandles "special" in some way?

Update: Thanks, all!

In reply to Regarding STDOUT and indirect object notation for print by romandas

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