hello: this is coming from a novice so pls be kind. want to key a set of filehandles in a hash, along the following lines:

open $hash{'t'},"test.txt";
...
@lines = <$hash{'t'}>;

print @lines; # end up with a GLOB pointer, 
                    # not the contents of the file

close $hash{'t"];

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however when I code this way I get a GLOB reference. In order to print out the actual contents of the file I have to gimmick the filehandle as follows:

open $hash{'t'},"test.txt";
$a = $hash{'t'};                 # pass the hash value 
                                        # to another scalar

@lines = <$a>;                # and suddenly grabbing the @lines 
print @lines;                     # results in correct output!
...

[download]

Granted this is an easy enough workaround in practice. But I would like to understand why it appears to be necessary to pass the filehandle in $hash{'t'} to $a before <$a> returns correct output to @lines. This is not great way to do it, and I suspect there's some form of dereferencing that could eliminate the need for the intermediary assignment to $a. Thanks for any thoughts!

In reply to why doesn't this work by daiyu

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