Actually, tilly, I think that lemmett did want the END blocks to fire when Perl exited, not the subroutine. It would be kind of silly to create a temp file and then proceed to delete it before passing it back to the user. :-)

But I whole-heartedly agree with your suggestion to use File::Temp.

Update (for tilly's update): I like the idea of using a ReleaseAction for unlinking the file as long as the order of execution is OK. That's certainly an interesting way of binding a ReleaseAction to the filehandle (assigning the action reference to the scalar part of the anonymous symbol, right?). I hadn't thought about sticking extra info into the filehandle like that. :-)

bbfu
Seasons don't fear The Reaper.
Nor do the wind, the sun, and the rain.
We can be like they are.