Question

Here’s the relevant excerpt from the documentation of the ref function:

The value returned depends on the type of thing the reference is a reference to. Builtin types include:

SCALAR
ARRAY
HASH
CODE
REF
GLOB
LVALUE
FORMAT
IO
VSTRING
Regexp

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Based on this, I imagined that calling ref on a filehandle would return 'IO'. Surprisingly, it doesn’t:

use strict;
use warnings;

open my $fileHandle, '<', 'aValidFile';
close $fileHandle;

print ref $fileHandle;     # prints 'GLOB', not 'IO'

---

perlref tries to explain why:

It isn’t possible to create a true
reference to an IO handle (filehandle
or dirhandle) using the backslash
operator. The most you can get is a
reference to a typeglob, which is
actually a complete symbol table
entry […] However, you can still
use type globs and globrefs
as though they were IO handles.

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In what circumstances would ref return 'IO' then?

Answer 1

The only way to get an IO reference is to use the *FOO{THING} syntax:

$ioref = *glob{IO};

where glob is a named glob like STDIN or a reference like $fh. But once you have
such a reference, it can be passed around or stored in arbitrary data structures just like any other scalar, so things like marshalling modules need to be savvy of it.

Since a glob or globref can be used as a filehandle and implicitly get the contained IO thingy, there isn’t a lot of need for IO refs. The main exception is this:

use Symbol;
# replace *FOO{IO} handle but not $FOO, %FOO, etc.
*FOO = geniosym;

(geniosym returns a new semi-anonymous IO reference, and any non-glob reference-to-glob assignment only assigns to that particular reference’s part of the glob)