http://www.perlmonks.org?node_id=219

fileno

See the current Perl documentation for fileno.

Here is our local, out-dated (pre-5.6) version:


fileno - return file descriptor from filehandle



fileno FILEHANDLE



Returns the file descriptor for a filehandle. This is useful for constructing bitmaps for select() and low-level POSIX tty-handling operations. If FILEHANDLE is an expression, the value is taken as an indirect filehandle, generally its name.

You can use this to find out whether two handles refer to the same underlying descriptor:

    if (fileno(THIS) == fileno(THAT)) {
        print "THIS and THAT are dups\n";
    }