Well, not answering your question but the entire framework here seems off kilter. If you want to populate a hash with a bunch of filehandles what about

my @files; #the files
my %handles;
foreach my $name (@files) {
     open $handles{$name},$name or die "$name:$!";
}
foreach my $fh (values %handles) {
  print $fh scalar(localtime),"\n";
}
foreach my $fh (values %handles) {
  close $fh;
}
[download]

Anyway, a quick $.02 while excel loads another 20mb "database" (NOT!) across the network.

Oooh! For the record tilly has pointed out that autovivification is a 5.6 feature and wont work in those prehistoric version that some systems have installed ;-) :-)

Yves / DeMerphq
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