Unfortunately, "not working properly" is not a very helpful problem statement. All I can tell for sure is that your program fails to compile. And yes, the blast of compiler messages can be daunting.

You are actually doing a number of things right:

• Enabling strictures (use strict;);
• Enabling warnings (use warnings;);
• Using lexical file handles (open my $fh, ... instead of open FH, ...);
• Using three-argument open (open my $fh, '<', $file instead of open $fh, "<$file");
• Checking whether the open succeeded (open ... or die ...);

All the compile errors I get are due to undeclared variables. In fact, they end in the text (did you forget to declare "my ..."?). In some cases the fix is easy: just stick a "my" in front of the first assignment to the variable. In others you need to actually declare the value somewhere. For example, you need a my @fruits; somewhere above the call to parse(). And in some you need to think about where the value is to come from.