Obviously I agree that the implementation is incomplete; and yes, it is orthogonal to the OP's question. A user of a module like this would be responsible for managing their own filehandles -- as earlier answers said: store a dup of STDOUT.

Support for all the special variables needs a little thought, because they are dynamically scoped. I'd probably want to capture their values in the "open" function and store those values in the object. But, OTOH, maybe someone changing the values dynamically knows what they're doing.

I'm not sure that binmode is required for this filehandle. All it does is call a user-defined perl function for each line (implicitly text). If that code prints to a "real" filehandle, then it is that filehandle that needs to support binmode.

I'd be interested to know how to rewrite the "open" function to avoid needing 5.8.x -- the requirement exists because of bugs in 5.6.x, so the simplest (and safest) thing it to require a version of perl that works reliably with tied filehandles.

The conclusion I'd draw from this is that filehandles aren't as simple as we'd like -- because there's more underlying complexity than initially apparent.

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