Why is three-argument open calls with autovivified filehandles a Perl best practice?

• Using typeglobs for filehandles (like OUT) is not a good idea, as they are global across your entire program - you need to be sure that no other routine including those in modules are using the same name (including in the future).
• Using the two-argument form of open exposes your application to mis-behaviour caused by variables containing special characters, for example my $f; open $f, ">$some_filename"; is exposed to the bug where $some_filename containing a leading > will change the program's behaviour.

Using the three-argument form avoids this by separating the mode and filename into separate arguments where they can't interfere.

Moreover, using the lots-of-arguments form with pipes is a very good idea:

open $pipe, '|-', 'sendmail', '[email protected]';

Is better than doing it all as a single string – it avoids possible shell injection etc.

Tackling #2:

OUT is a global filehandle and using it exposes you to insidious bugs like this:

sub doSomething {
  my ($input) = @_;
  # let's compare $input to something we read from another file
  open(F, "<", $anotherFile);
  @F = <F>; 
  close F;
  &do_some_comparison($input, @F);
}

open(F, "<", $myfile);
while (<F>) {
    &doSomething($_);   # do'h -- just closed the F filehandle
}
close F;