How can I check if a filehandle is open in Perl? [

Question

This question already has answers here:

How can I test if I can write to a filehandle? (5 answers)

Closed 2 years ago.

Is there a way to check if a file is already open in Perl? I want to have a read file access, so don't require flock.

 open(FH, "<$fileName") or die "$!\n" if (<FILE_IS_NOT_ALREADY_OPEN>);
 #  or something like
 close(FH) if (<FILE_IS_OPEN>);

Answer 1

The Scalar::Util module provides the openhandle() function for this. Unlike fileno(), it handles perl filehandles which aren't associated with OS filehandles. Unlike tell(), it doesn't produce warnings when used on an unopened filehandle From the module's documentation:

openhandle FH

Returns FH if FH may be used as a filehandle and is open, or FH is a tied handle. Otherwise "undef" is returned.

   $fh = openhandle(*STDIN);           # \*STDIN
   $fh = openhandle(\*STDIN);          # \*STDIN
   $fh = openhandle(*NOTOPEN);         # undef
   $fh = openhandle("scalar");         # undef

Answer 2

Why would you want to do that? The only reason I can think of is when you're using old style package filehandles (which you seem to be doing) and want to prevent accidentally saving one handle over another.

That issue can be resolved by using new style indirect filehandles.

open my $fh, '<', $filename or die "Couldn't open $filename: $!";

Answer 3

Tell produces a warning (so does stat, -s, -e, etc..) with use warnings (-w)

perl -wle '
    open my $fh, "<", "notexists.txt"; 
    print "can stat fh" if tell $fh
'
tell() on closed filehandle $fh at -e line 1.
-1

The alternatives fileno($fh) and eof($fh) do not produce warnings. I found the best alternative was to save the output from open.

Answer 4

Please see the answer regarding openhandle() from Scalar::Util. The answer I originally wrote here was once the best we could do, but it's now badly outdated.

Answer 5

Perl provides the fileno function for exactly this purpose.

EDIT I stand corrected on the purpose of fileno(). I do prefer the shorter test

fileno FILEHANDLE

over

tell FH != -1