se strict;
use warnings;

#why negate, reverse the operations. Also, specifying STDIN is more self documenting.
my $infile  = @ARGV ? shift(@ARGV) : <STDIN>;
my $outfile = @ARGV ? shift(@ARGV) : <STDIN>;

handlefix($infile,$outfile);

open(INFILE, '<', $infile) or die "\nCan't open $infile: $!\n";
open(OUTFILE, '>', $outfile) or die "\nCan't open $outfile: $!\n";

print OUTFILE 
               map { my $s=$_; $s=~s/\s*#.*$//; $s } 
              (grep { !/^\s*#/ } <INFILE>), "\n"   ; 

#close INFILE && close OUTFILE; close returns a value... if the first close fails Perl will ignore second close

close INFILE;
close OUTFILE; 

sub handlefix {
    for(@_){
        chomp($_);
        $_=~s/"//g;
        $_=~s/\//\\/g;
    }
}

##</code><code>##

sub handlefix {
    my @return;
    for(@_){
        my $val = $_; #decouple the value from the argument variable
        chomp($val);
        $val =~ s/"//g;
        $val =~ s/\//\\/g;
    }
    return @return;
}
($infile,$outfile) = handlefix($infile,$outfile); #more obvious what is happening