Re: Treating filehandles like strings

Bart Lateur wrote:
> On Mon, 07 Aug 2000 17:43:29 -0700, Nathan Wiger wrote:
> >> I'd rather have a filehandle stringify to
> >> the filename instead.
> >
> >Great minds think alike. :-) I was actually going to add this to the new
> >version of the open() RFC as a possible use of RFC 49's
> >soon-to-be-renamed STRING method.
> 
> This question has been asked a few times on comp.lang.perl.misc. It is
> in general not possible. On Unix, a file can have more than one name.
> The name can be changed while the file is open. Do you want the
> filehandle to track that? Another file could have taken the name, after
> the first file was opened. It's even possible that the name is deleted,
> so there IS no more name for it.

You misunderstand.  I want to write this:

  open my $file, '/path/to/file' or die "can't open $file: $!";
  # code passes
  # /path/to/file is removed by another process
  # dang! what file did I open?
  print "I opened $file\n"; # ahh! that was it

Jon
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