Re: Still blurry on variables for filehandles

[Errto]

The issue comes from assigning $foo to the string 'FILE'. As others have mentioned, you can call open on an undefined scalar lvalue and it will magically assign a filehandle to it. If you are so inclined, you can also do it explicitly yourself:

use IO::File;
my $foo = new IO::Handle;
open $foo, '<', 'data.txt';

Update: switched modules per ikegami's suggestion.

[ikegami]

I'd use IO::File over FileHandle. FileHandle is a backwards compatibility wrapper for IO::File.