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The comment in IO/Handle.pm says:

# There is no need for DESTROY to do anything, because when the
# last reference to an IO object is gone, Perl automatically
# closes its associated files (if any). However, to avoid any
# attempts to autoload DESTROY, we here define it to do nothing.

So how do people destroy the handle without close()ing? I think some
POSIX magic should be done, but which one?

Puzzled,
Ilya

P.S. WHY?

Suppose I make a same-fd duplicate (open "<&=11"). Now I want
to get rid of it - but I must not close() the original handle -
hence not close() the duplicate IO::Handle.

On 2010-10-06, Ben Morrow <> wrote:
>> So how do people destroy the handle without close()ing?

> Looking at Perl_io_close in doio.c suggests using
>
> binmode $FH, "op" while PerlIO::get_layers $FH;
>
> before the handle goes out of scope. After this fileno $FH returns -1,
> and ktrace confirms that closing it doesn't attempt to call close(2).

Thanks for a wonderful piece of voodoo!
Ilya