Hi Corion hope you're well, sorry I've not got back to you, I had to take a week off work due to family reasons. I'm back at the code today and am trying to follow the steps and suggestions you indicated before. So far, so good, but I have a problem with "blindly" opening the .md5 equivalent of the file I pass to the 'routine' subroutine

The code I have so far is (with exclusion of the other subroutines which I know work fine):

use strict;
use warnings;
use Digest::MD5;

my $sourcedirectory = '//path/to/directory';

&main();

sub main {

    # creating file array
    my @files = &getfiles($sourcedirectory);
    # removal of the two directory structures which form the start of 
+the file array
    my $rmdir = shift (@files);
    my $rmdir2 = shift (@files);

    # capture of a count of the number of files remaining in the array
    my $filecount = @files;
    
    # check to see if there are no files, if none, exit script
    if ($filecount == 0) {
        print "\nNo files to process\n\n";
        exit;
    }
    # where there are files, the routine subroutine is called for each
+ item individually (except for md5 file types)
    else {
        foreach my $item (@files) {
            next if $item =~ /.md5/;
            my $filepath = "$sourcedirectory/$item";
            &routine($filepath, $item);
        }
    
    }
}


sub routine {

    # identify filepath and name as parameters passed to routine
    my $file = shift;
    my $name = shift;
    
    # open file, set to binary mode, close and process MD5
    open my $fh, '<', $file or die "Can't open file: $!";
    binmode ($fh);
    my $md5tocompare = &processmd5($fh);
    close $fh or die "Can't close file successfully: $!";
    
    # check file.md5 existence and open and read to memory
    open my $fh2, '<', "$file.md5" or next;
    my $originalmd5 = <$fh2>;
    close $fh2 or die "Can't close file successfully: $!";
    
    # check parity
    print "MD5 is $md5tocompare against orignal MD5 of $originalmd5\n"
+;
}
...
[download]

Every time I run this code, the script exits the at the 'next' statement upon attempting to open the "$file.md5" handle. Do you have any idea what I am doing wrong here? I know the MD5 file exists so it is probably syntax or the way I am trying to get a handle on the file, but I'm at a loss at the moment. Tried it bare, with single and double quotes etc :)

Any indicator you could provide would be appreciated

Many thanks