Redirect STDOUT to file in Perl 5

Every now and then, I need to write little scripts (or not so little) that output *lots* of lines of text. Those lines belong to a single file, so my common idiom is printing the output to STDOUT, and tell the user to redirect the output to a file if he wants it toasted into a file.

But there's a more elegant way to do it that doesn't rely on shells, and works more consistently. In fact TIMTOWTDI.

One way is fill the code with:

if ($outputInFile) { print $file "foo";}
else{print "foo"}

/me shivers ...

I found a way to do it quite elegantly redirecting a file handler where I'll be printing to STDOUT, using Typeglobs. I'm not too confident managing typeglobs, but it seems to work :)

	#!/usr/bin/perl
	use Data::Dumper::Perltidy;
	use Getopt::Long;
	use Perl6::Say;
	use Pod::Usage;
	use autodie;
	use strict;
	use warnings;
	sub man {#{{{
	pod2usage(
	-exitval => 1,
	-verbose => 2
	);
	}#}}}
	# main
	GetOptions (
	'man' => \&man,
	);
	my $output = shift;
	my $outputfh;
	if (defined $output) {
	open $outputfh , '>', $output ;
	}
	else { $outputfh = \*STDOUT }
	print $outputfh "prova\n";
	close $outputfh;
	__END__#{{{
	perl fileOrSTDOUT1.pl
	prints "prova" on STDOUT
	perl fileOrSTDOUT1.pl /tmp/output
	writes "prova" to file /tmp/output
	# vim: set tabstop=4 shiftwidth=4 foldmethod=marker : ###}}}

view raw fileOrSTDOUT1.pl hosted with ❤ by GitHub

I asked at #barcelona.pm and alexm (O HAI! president) told me I could think it the other way around, and overwrite STDOUT to an opened filehandle in case I needed the redirection. I didn't know I could handle STDOUT like any other fh. It's nice to know it.

	#!/usr/bin/perl
	use Data::Dumper::Perltidy;
	use Getopt::Long;
	use Perl6::Say;
	use Pod::Usage;
	use autodie;
	use strict;
	use warnings;
	sub man {#{{{
	pod2usage(
	-exitval => 1,
	-verbose => 2
	);
	}#}}}
	# main
	GetOptions (
	'man' => \&man,
	);
	my $output = shift;
	if (defined $output) {
	open STDOUT , '>', $output ;
	}
	print "prova\n";
	__END__#{{{
	perl fileOrSTDOUT2.pl
	prints "prova" on STDOUT
	perl fileOrSTDOUT2.pl /tmp/output
	writes "prova" to file /tmp/output
	# vim: set tabstop=4 shiftwidth=4 foldmethod=marker : ###}}}

view raw fileOrSTDOUT2.pl hosted with ❤ by GitHub

I think Casiano taught me (back in university times) another way to do it (maybe it was using tee, or some IO::Handle funky stuff).

Is there any cpan module that does that kind of Stdout vs file output? I haven't found it, but it MUST be there. Or maybe the code to do it is so small it doesn't make sense writing a module for that