Programming Perl, 3rd Edition

Filehandles

Unless you're using artificial intelligence to model a solipsistic philosopher, your program needs some way to communicate with the outside world. In lines 3 and 4 of our Average Example you'll see the word GRADES, which exemplifies another of Perl's data types, the filehandle. A filehandle is just a name you give to a file, device, socket, or pipe to help you remember which one you're talking about, and to hide some of the complexities of buffering and such. (Internally, filehandles are similar to streams from a language like C++ or I/O channels from BASIC.)

Filehandles make it easier for you to get input from and send output to many different places. Part of what makes Perl a good glue language is that it can talk to many files and processes at once. Having nice symbolic names for various external objects is just part of being a good glue language.^[13]

You create a filehandle and attach it to a file by using open. The open function takes at least two parameters: the filehandle and filename you want to associate it with. Perl also gives you some predefined (and preopened) filehandles. STDIN is your program's normal input channel, while STDOUT is your program's normal output channel. And STDERR is an additional output channel that allows your program to make snide remarks off to the side while it transforms (or attempts to transform) your input into your output.^[14]

Since you can use the open function to create filehandles for various purposes (input, output, ...