File descriptors and local variables

[Paul K <paulclinger@...>]

Hi All,

I've written on several occasions something that looks like this:

local exists = io.open("/somefile") ~= nil

What happens to the returned file handle in those cases when
"/somefile" exists? The documentation states that the file is closed
when the handle is garbage collected after going out of scope, but
does it go out of scope immediately (as it's not assigned to anything)
or only after reaching the "end" statement for the current scope?
Thank you.

Paul.