Hey everyone-- There's nothing magical about SAVEOUT. I was trying to use Cookbook 7.20 to try a solution and picked an arbitrary filehandle (SAVEOUT) to test stuff out.

I've tried VSarkiss' idea already. The error messages were vague.

I then tried Brent's idea:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
$log_file = "logfile";
open(STDOUT, "| tee $log_file") or die "Can't open: $!\n";
print "Testing 1.2.3...\n";
close(STDOUT) or die "Can't close: $!\n";
open(STDOUT,'>-');
print "done\n";
close(STDOUT);
[download]

But that didn't work. I also tried ">-" but that didn't work either...In both cases, I never got "done" printed to the STDOUT. I stumbled upon this solution, though:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
$log_file = "logfile";
#copy file descriptor
open(OLDOUT,">&STDOUT");
open(STDOUT, "| tee $log_file") or die "Can't open: $!\n";
print "Testing 1.2.3...\n";
close(STDOUT) or die "Can't close: $!\n";
#restore STDOUT
open(STDOUT,">&OLDOUT");
print "done\n";
close(OLDOUT);
[download]

Results:

Testing 1.2.3... gets put into logfile and STDOUT
done             gets put on STDOUT only
[download]

Is there a less convoluted way of doing this without having to copy file descriptors? And why does this solution work...it still puzzles me why this works...I somehow got to this solution by reading 7.20.

Thanks everyone for your help. --slojuggler2