Close file (or pipe or socket) handle

Daftar Isi

• close FILEHANDLE

• close

  Closes the file or pipe associated with the filehandle, flushes the IObuffers, and closes the system file descriptor. Returns true if thoseoperations succeed and if no error was reported by any PerlIOlayer. Closes the currently selected filehandle if the argument isomitted.

  You don't have to close FILEHANDLE if you are immediately going to doanother open on it, because open closes it for you. (Seeopen.) However, an explicit close on an input file resets the linecounter ($.), while the implicit close done by open does not.

  If the filehandle came from a piped open, close returns false if one ofthe other syscalls involved fails or if its program exits with non-zerostatus. If the only problem was that the program exited non-zero, $!will be set to 0. Closing a pipe also waits for the process executingon the pipe to exit--in case you wish to look at the output of the pipeafterwards--and implicitly puts the exit status value of that command into$? and ${^CHILD_ERROR_NATIVE}.

  If there are multiple threads running, close on a filehandle from apiped open returns true without waiting for the child process to terminate,if the filehandle is still open in another thread.

  Closing the read end of a pipe before the process writing to it at theother end is done writing results in the writer receiving a SIGPIPE. Ifthe other end can't handle that, be sure to read all the data beforeclosing the pipe.

  Example:

   open(OUTPUT, '|sort >foo')  # pipe to sort
   
   or die "Can't start sort: $!";
   
   #... # print stuff to output
   
   close OUTPUT # wait for sort to finish
   
   or warn $! ? "Error closing sort pipe: $!"
   
     : "Exit status $? from sort";
   
   open(INPUT, 'foo')  # get sort's results
   
   or die "Can't open 'foo' for input: $!";
   

  FILEHANDLE may be an expression whose value can be used as an indirectfilehandle, usually the real filehandle name or an autovivified handle.