rich.wilder welcome,

to open a file handle the lexical form explained above is, nowadays, a must. Perl is better when you choose the right idiom. In this case the idiom is:

       open my $file_handle, '>', '/path/file.ext' or die "Open failed
+: $!";
       # or to be clean put parens to open args
       open (my $file_handle, '>', '/path/file.ext') or die "Open fail
+ed: $!"
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For future reference and further reading you can visit Re: Why don't file handles have sigils? (*) where tye says that the sigil for global filehandles is * like it happens for globs.

L*