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From: crehta@tasu74.UUCP (Ran Ever-Hadani)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.perl
Subject: Passing file handles as parameters
Message-ID: <3751@taux01.UUCP>
Date: 2 May 90 08:00:34 GMT
Sender: netnews@taux01.UUCP
Reply-To: crehta@taux01.nsc.com (Ran Ever-Hadani)
Organization: National Semiconductor (IC) Ltd, Israel
Lines: 31

I have a perl program that keeps many similar output files 
open simultaniously.

I have a single routine which does the formatting of output
to all of them.  I would love to be able to call the routine
with the output file as a parameter.  Would this be possible
in the future?

What I tried do far was this:

- I had the routine print to its own file handle OUT, which I attached
  to the output file; the calling line was 
	open (OUT, ">&$file"); &do_out;
  This forced me to set all outputs to unbuffered, which I didn't want.

- I passed a string containing the filehandle name as a parameter,
  and called eval to insert it to a print command;  This made the
  program about 15 times slower.

- I defined an output format for each of the files which contained
  a single variable $out_line.  This seemed the best sollution.

-- Ran
  my program about 15 times slower than simply copying the damn
  routine inline without the eval.

- 
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Reply-To: crehta@taux01.nsc.com (Ran Ever-Hadani)
Disclaimer: The above is to be attributed to me only, not to any organization.
Apology: Bad English.  E-mailed spelling and style corrections are welcome.