I've got a pretty good grasp of typeglobs and filehandles but one thing I don't get is the difference between: 
my $fh =  *STDOUT; and
my $fh = \*STDOUT;

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The first one places a filehandle directly into the contents of $fh while the second puts a reference to a filehandle into it. I'm with you there. But what's the practical difference between the two assignments? Is there ever a reason for using one over the other?

For example, the line below works with both cases above: 

print $fh "What the?";

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Similarly, the open function works just as well with either kind of indirect filehandle assignment. Thanks again, Monks. I'll make my donation in advance.

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In reply to Indirect filehandles by nysus

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