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From: darrylo@hpnmdla.HP.COM (Darryl Okahata)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.perl
Subject: Bug in perl3pl44?
Message-ID: <8310020@hpnmdla.HP.COM>
Date: 1 Feb 91 19:23:12 GMT
Organization: HP Network Measurements Div, Santa Rosa, CA
Lines: 41


     In perl 3 pl 44, Can a filehandle be passed by reference be opened
in a subroutine and be passed back to the caller?  I have a subroutine
that opens a filehandle passed by reference and passes it back to the
caller.  However, when I use the filehandle in the caller, it's as if
the filehandle was never opened.

     Here's a short example:

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
#! /usr/bin/perl
#
# This perl script should create a file called "foofile" in the current
# directory, and the file should contain a couple lines of text.
# However, it doesn't.
#

$file = "foofile";
&open_file(*output, $file);
print output "foo1\n";
print output "foo2\n";
close(output);

exit 1;

###############################################################################

sub open_file
{
	local(*output2, $file) = @_;

	open(output2, ">$file") || die "Can't open $file";
}
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

     Am I doing something stupid, or is this a bug?  I'm running perl on
an HP375 running HP-UX 7.0.

     -- Darryl Okahata
	UUCP: {hplabs!, hpcea!, hpfcla!} hpnmd!darrylo
	Internet: darrylo%hpnmd@hp-sde.sde.hp.com