“In the past two columns, I looked at using references in Perl
and showed the basic syntax for creating references to arrays,
hashes, scalars, and subroutines. I also described the canonical
form of converting a non-reference expression into a reference, and
how to use the shortcut rules to make this simpler.”
“Let’s take a look now at filehandles and directory handles.
These handles let us look at or talk to the “outside world,” a
worthwhile endeavor if we want our program to have some permanent
impact on the computing environment.”
“First, recall that a filehandle doesn’t really have a syntax to
make it a full-fledged variable. You can’t assign it, use it
(directly) with local() or my(), pass it to or from a subroutine,
or store it into a data structure. What does that leave? Well,
there are about a dozen operations that use a filehandle or a
directory handle, specified by a bareword (an alphanumeric symbol
sequence separated by double colons, like STDIN or
MyPack::Output).”