Thanks kcott, I believe the added scoping you show is one of the things haukex had previously alluded to (at least that's how I interpreted his suggestion). As I had previously mentioned, I have a not so great habit of opening all my required input files immediately near the top of all my programs (essentially making all filehandles global) just to make sure they exist. I do this so users can figure out immediately if they forgot a certain input file and don't wait for my program to grind away processing the other ones before the program has to die. As haukex also pointed out, a simple file test would be a better way to go about that, presumably a series of simple -e tests replacing all the opens at the top of my program, and then the more constrained scoping as I open and process each file.