opening two filehandles with same filehandle name

[bobbybobbertson]

I just realized that I have a foreach statement in a bunch of my perl scripts that open a filehandle without closing it. The scripts work fine, but is there a need to fix this?
Or does perl automatically close a filehandle when another with the same name is opened?

my statement looks as follows:

foreach my $file_to_open (@files_to_open) {
open LOGFILE, $file_to_open or die "nogood $!";
#do work here
}

 

[Grahf]

Not sure what will happen, but what's the harm in just including the line close LOGFILE; at the end of your loop?

 

[MikeLacey]

doesn't usually matter

but... (and you knew this was coming....)

I had a script running on cron, every minute of every day.

ran through a directory opening all of the files - doing stuff and then terminating.

worked fine, no problems, for two years and then I upgraded from HPUX 10.10 to 10.20 and it failed horribly - the kernal ran out of file handles

so.... now I always close files Mike
michael.j.lacey@ntlworld.com
Email welcome if you're in a hurry or something -- but post in tek-tips as well please, and I will post my reply here as well.

 

[bobbybobbertson]

Is there a way to to see on a linux server how many file hanles are currently open? and what programs have them open?

 

[latch]

[Dont know if Perl can override these settings]

The maximum number of files that a process can open is defined by _SC_OPEN_MAX is unistd.h;

'man sysconf' has more on that.

<Not sure>
For POSIX standards , I think a single process can open a maximum of 63 files at any time.
</Not sure>


Help anybody?

regards
C &quot;Brahmaiva satyam&quot;
-Adi Shankara (788-820 AD)