Question

If I have a subroutine that opens a file what is the best way to ensure it opens it only upon the first time the subrountine is called? I have this but not sure if its best practice:

{
my $count = 0;
sub log_msg {
    my ($msg,$name) = @_;

    if ($count == 0) {
        my $log_file_name = "/tmp/" . $name;
        open my $log_fh,">",$log_file_name or  croak "couldn't open $log_file_name : $!";
        print $log_fh "$timestamp: created and opened $log_file_name\n";
    }
    $count++;
    }
}

Answer 1

Sounds like a good reason to use a state variable. Store the filehandles in a persistent hash.

#!/usr/bin/perl

use 5.010;
use strict;
use warnings;

sub log_msg {
  state %fh;
  my ($msg, $name) = @_;

  unless ($fh{$name}) {
    warn "Opening $name\n";
    open $fh{$name}, '>', $name or die $!;
    print {$fh{$name}} scalar localtime, " Opened file\n";
  }

  print {$fh{$name}} $msg, "\n";
}

log_msg('Message1', 'first.log');
log_msg('Message2', 'first.log');
log_msg('MessageA', 'second.log');
log_msg('MessageB', 'second.log');

Note the extra set of braces around the filehandles in the print call. That’s because print is a bit picky about what you can use as its filehandle argument.