I found that open my $fh doesn't even work for older versions of Perl and have to do something like open \*FH, "blah"; my $fh = \*FH; for old Perls which has a similar effect as the embedded my $fh but isn't quite the same as the erm a bit barer globs you are talking about... But to make code portable between versions without those hardcoded globs, the only way I could think of is something like:

use FileHandle;
my $fh = new FileHandle "< $file"; 
$fh -> open;
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It just so happens that this way you can put your $fh on the left after all. Unfortunately, for anonymous pipes your point of confusion moves a bit rather than disappears...

use FileHandle;
my $ph = new FileHandle "ps -ef |";
my $pid = $ph -> open; # and you're sort of back where you started.
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