The file handle is the PID of the process that opened the file, it monitors the process that asked for the file to be opened. and if that process goes down the

The file handle is the PID of the process that opened the file, it monitors the process that asked for the file to be opened. and if that process goes down the file will be closed. You can also add an else in the with so it looks like with {:ok, fh} <- File.open(filename), {:ok, contents} <- IO.read(fh) do contents else {:error, reason} -> File.close(fh) {:error, reason} # this will return after the file has been closed end or maybe you would prefer to open the file, and pass that into the with and either way close the file. I just used IO as an example because they return nice {:ok, x} or {:error, reason} tuples, but this works with any pattern. The benefits over an exception is as the caller i can pattern match on the result of this. so i could have this is in a function in a case result = case with_example(filename) do {:ok, result} -> result {:error, :some_reason} -> # this is recoverable, do something else #log the issue recover!(filename) # bangs in functions indicate they can fail and raise an error {:error, :another_reason} -> # this is unrecoverable # log the issue raise "unrecoverable error" _ -> # any other case we don't know about raise "unexpected issue" or i might not care and want it to crash if it doesn't match {:ok, parsed} = with_example(filename) # will raise a match error if {:error, reason is returned