I promised that I'd write up the things that I think Perl most needs as clear-cut changes that will still significantly improve working in Perl. This is the first thing I'm posting along those lines: This is one of the things I would most like to see addressed in the next stable release of perl. We've got a five year old ticket about it. I will decline to speculate what that says about it getting done: https://rt.perl.org/rt3/Ticket/Display.html?id=57512 Tom's description there is, to nobody's surprise, thorough and on point. Basically: autovivified filehandles in lexical variables feel a *lot* easier to use, and avoid package variables, which we try to discourage elsewhere for various reasons. The problem is that the list of reasons to use them sometimes includes, "and you don't have to account for closing them, because they close when the reference is destroyed!" Yeah, they close, and the error status is lost forever, like tears in rain. We should issue a warning when an implicit close results in error. autodie.pm can then fatalize that warning. We should also fatalize errors on the implicit close of the selected fh at END, to deal with errors during -i, for example. -- rjbsThread Next