Here is my (humble) opinion on why it is best to avoid bareword file handles...(Update: except for STDIN, STDERR, DATA, ARGV, and the like...)

While it doesn't matter in a situation as simple as in the OP, in a non-trivial situation, if you use a lexical file handle (and 'use strict'), you can avoid the following bug:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

my $file = "file.txt";

CreateFile($file);

system frobnicate => $file;

sub CreateFile {
  my $f = shift;
  open(OUTPUT_FILE, ">$f") or die "Err: $!";
  for (1..100) {
    print OUTPUT_FILE "$_\n";
  }
  # blah, blah, blah...
  close OUTPUT_FH
}

[download]
This exact sort of thing happened here@work, where there is a serious lack of lexical file handle use, and took a non-zero amount of time to debug. It also failed to influence anyone's decision in choice of file handle type :-(

In reply to Re^3: unquoted string error??!! by runrig
in thread unquoted string error??!! by aji

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