G'day catfish1116,

Here's some additional information that I didn't see in any of the responses.

You're getting errors reported because you're implicitly using the strict pragma. It's good that you're doing this but perhaps you were unaware of this implicit usage. It occurs because you've specified that version 5.12, or later, is required. See use for details.

When specifying a version, the 5.012 form is preferred over the v5.12 form for backwards compatibility. It is, after all, older versions of Perl that you want to target with such a statement. That's also described in more detail in use.

I concur with advice you've received about using lexical filehandles with the 3-argument form of open. Hand-crafting '... or die "...";' messages is error-prone: you can forget to add them; you can forget to update them when related code changes; you can omit important information such as that contained in $!. To avoid these problems, and save yourself a lot of typing, consider using the autodie pragma.

I saw that CONFIG vs. $CONFIG was pointed out; you have the same problem with OUTPUT vs. $OUTPUT.