output to STDOUT or a file

[metaperl]

Description:

apparently FileHandle is deprecated in favor of IO. Here is some code that allows you to write to either STDOUT or a file.

use IO qw(File Handle);

my $io = do 
{
    if (shift) 
    {
    my $tmp = IO::Handle->new;

    die "open failed: $!" unless $tmp->fdopen(fileno(STDOUT),"w");
    $tmp;
    } 
    else 
    {
    my $tmp = IO::File->new('tmp.out', 'w');
    $tmp;
    }
};

$io->print("Some text\n");

[bv]

I'm confused about this line:

if (shift)

What are you shifting off? Or is it just a general "put a condition here" line? Also, how does this benefit over:

my $fh;
if(my $filename = shift)
{
    open $fh, '>', $filename or die "Can't open $filename: $!";
}
else
{
    open $fh, '>&', STDOUT;
}

print $fh "Where do you want to go today?\n";