mohamedrabeek has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hello, I am just wondering why the "use strict;" does not produce any errors when we use bareword file handle. For example, the following code is not throwing any errors. use strict; open FH, ">test.txt" or die "not able to open file for writing $!"; Thanks & Regards, Mohamed

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Re: use strict and bareword filehandle
by toolic (Bishop) on Apr 11, 2012 at 18:30 UTC
    According to perldoc open:
    if FILEHANDLE is an expression, its value is the real filehandle. (This is considered a symbolic reference, so use strict "refs" should not be in effect.)
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Re: use strict and bareword filehandle
by eyepopslikeamosquito (Archbishop) on Apr 12, 2012 at 02:35 UTC

    If you want to catch this sort of thing, you could try using Perl::Critic. For example, running the default perlcritic command on your example code: 

    use strict;
open FH, ">test.txt" or die "not able to open file for writing $!";

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    produces three warnings, as shown below: 
    # perlcritic blah.pl
Bareword file handle opened at line 2, column 1.  See pages 202,204 of
+ PBP.  (Severity: 5)
Two-argument "open" used at line 2, column 1.  See page 207 of PBP.  (
+Severity: 5)
Code before warnings are enabled at line 2, column 1.  See page 431 of
+ PBP.  (Severity: 5)

    [download]

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Re: use strict and bareword filehandle
by Anonymous Monk on Apr 12, 2012 at 00:17 UTC

    Backwards compatibility :)

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