Re: Treating filehandles like strings

Bart Lateur <[email protected]> writes:

> 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. 
> >
> >Now I know I have at least I have one supporter! ;-)
> 
> 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.
> 
> Now, what you can do, is stat() on the filehandle, and pick out the
> device ID and the inode number. That combination is unique for each
> file.

And what happens when its a tied filehandle? Or are we going to
require that the tying class provides a STRINGIFY method as well?

-- 
Piers