I am just commending to avoid confusion, OP on the open function has write mode > instead of read mode <.

Because the OP opens this file with the intent of writing data to it, as shown in this code line:

print $fh $count;
[download]

So there is really nothing wrong with that.

The OP code is reading from a file (passed as an argument to the program) and writing to another, opened explicitly with the open command.