Have you chomped the filenames when reading them from the text file?

foreach $page (@files) {
        my $xp = XML::XPath->new(filename => $page);
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The salient bit here would be how you are generating @files. You say it is a "simple text file", but you don't show the code you use to read it in. Did you perhaps forget to chomp the lines? What's in the "..." in "Cannot open file..." (an important diagnostic message, perhaps)? As Corion suggests, can you guarantee the files in the list are actually valid to begin with?

My apologies for not being complete. The file list is a manually created list of selected file paths. As far as whether or not they exist - if I pair the list down to just the first file - the script works fine. Here is the entire script:

use XML::XPath;
use XML::XPath::XMLParser;

my $filelist = shift;

#Process file list
open(FILELIST, "$filelist") or die("Unable to open file");
my @files = <FILELIST>;
close(FILELIST);


    foreach $page (@files) {
        my $xp = XML::XPath->new(filename => $page);
        my $nodeset = $xp->find('//DCR'); # find all DCRs
        
        my @nodelist = $nodeset->get_nodelist;
        #@dcrs = map($_->string_value, @nodelist);
        @dcrs = map {$_->string_value ? $_->string_value : ()} @nodeli
+st;
        foreach my $dcr(@dcrs) {
           print "$dcr\n";
        } 
    }
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For some reason I thought I'd added chomp before and it didn't work:

 chomp($page);
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Most likely there is other whitespace at the end of your file names. Or maybe the "first" file exists in two places.

Does the script still fail if you have the line with the first, existing file duplicated?

chomp may not work if the filelist was manually created on a windows machine and you are running the script on unix. Suggest you try a regex instead.

open(IN,'file.txt') or die "$!";
my @files = <IN>;

foreach $page (@files) {
  $page =~ s/\s+$//g;
  print "parsing [$page]\n";
  # code
  
}
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poj

Also the complete error is:

Cannot open file 'file1.xml ' at /apps/interwoven/TeamSite/iw-perl/vendor/lib/XML/XPath.pm line 53.

How are you certain that the files actually exist? Maybe the error message is correct?

The new method just performs a -e and -r file test on the argument of new.

Do you provide the full file path in your list of files?

If the file list was created under Windows and you working on Unix/Linux/Cygwin, chomp will not be enough. Try this:

foreach $page (@files) {
     chomp $page;
     $page =~ s/\r//g;
     # ...
}
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<c>foreach $page (@files) {
     $page =~ s/[\r\n]//g;
     # ...
}
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