Here is my (humble) opinion on why it is best to avoid bareword file handles...
Yeah, let's avoid reading from STDIN, or avoid writing to STDOUT or STDERR. Or make use of the magical handles DATA or ARGV.

As long as the three most important filehandles (important enough that by default (at least on Unix), all processes will have them) are bare file handles, I cannot stop thinking "uttered by someone with limited knowledge of Perl" when hearing advice like "is best to avoid bareword file handles".

As for you example bug; first of all, your use of warnings would have caught any typos in filehandle names - close OUTPUT_FH generates the warning Name "main::OUTPUT_FH" used only once: possible typo at: .... Furthermore, the above does have a serious bug: it's not checking the return value of closed. If it did, it would have notices the failure of closing a handle that wasn't opened.

In reply to Re^4: unquoted string error??!! by JavaFan
in thread unquoted string error??!! by aji

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