vs.vaidyanathan 18 Newbie Poster

when i do a stderr redirect to stdout, does the shell open the stdout file? if so is there any way i can capture the opening of this file?

basically what i want to do is at the firstinstance of an error i want my perl script to die and log this first error. any general way to do this?

Also is there anywhere i can learn the intricacies of this ? the net is too huge a resource and am finding it difficult to understand if what is posted is relevant to what i want to know.
Thanks a lot in advance.