I'm confused about this line:

What are you shifting off? Or is it just a general "put a condition here" line? Also, how does this benefit over:

my $fh;
if(my $filename = shift)
{
    open $fh, '>', $filename or die "Can't open $filename: $!";
}
else
{
    open $fh, '>&', STDOUT;
}

print $fh "Where do you want to go today?\n";
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