Wrap the print in an eval perhaps?

eval only traps errors, not warnings.

no warnings 'unopened';
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Inside a small block should work though. See perllexwarn.

Perl 6 - the future is here, just unevenly distributed

seems not to work in my old Perl (5.8.8):

use strict;
use warnings;

no warnings qw(unopened);

open HUBBA, "/hubba";
print HUBBA "hubba";
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Produces a warning "print() on closed filehandle HUBBA at t line 6."

Guess I have to disable all warnings...

Is there a good reason not to use a lexical variable as file handle?

open my $FH, '>', 'whatever' or warn 'blah';

# much much later

if ($FH) { print $FH "something }
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works for sure.

Evidently, but at the moment the open is in a different lexial scope as the print so I would need to declare a lexical $FH in the common enclosing scope - I'll do that eventually.

But apart from your suggestions for suppressing the warning outright - is there really no easy way for checking such a handle?

After skimming perlmod and perlref I've dug up

print FH $foo if *{$foo}{IO};
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which is somewhat ugly, but seems to work.

Perl 6 - the future is here, just unevenly distributed

Or does "I don't want to go into the code right now" mean something other than "I don't have time/inclination/skills to do it right?"

if( fileno(FH) ) { print FH "something" }
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use File::Spec::Functions qw(devnull);
...
if(!open(FH, ">...")) { 
  warn " ... $!...";
  open(FH,'>',devnull) or die "$!";
}
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Checking a filehandle is problematic. Why not change your open to something like this:

open FH, '<', 'filename' or do { $failed = 1; warn $! };
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Now you've got a reliable Boolean variable rather than fragile hackish testing of the filehandle.