I tried to follow your methodology as closely as possible. There are easier and/or more efficient ways of doing what you're trying to do, but personally, I'd worry about style after you're a little more comfortable with the language as a whole. Not to discount style, mind you, but as with a spoken language, you don't worry about writing a sonnet or a haiku until you've learned how to write a sentence or paragraph.

#!/usr/local/bin/perl

use strict;
use vars qw( $addthis $tothis $newrecord );

open (TEXT, "general.txt") || die "Couldn't open file: $|\n";
$addthis = <TEXT>;
close (TEXT);

undef $/;

open (FILES,"files.txt") || die "Could not open file: $! \n";
while ( <FILES> ) {
    open ( DATA, $_ ) || die "Could not open file: $|\n";
    $tothis = <DATA>;
    close (DATA);
    $newrecord = $addthis . $tothis;
    open ( DATA, "> $_" ) || die "Could not write to file: $|\n";
    print $_, "\n";
    print DATA $newrecord;
    close (DATA);
}
close (FILES);
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Since you're treating all of the files as individual strings, you can do the undef $/; business. $/ is the input record separator, and since we aren't limiting the scope (i.e., putting undef $/; inside a subroutine, for example), it is a global change and will apply to all subsequently read files. And in this case, I think a 'while' loop is one of the easier ways to setup the looping. I don't want this to sound like a shameless plug, but I wrote the module File::Butler, and it was specifically designed to handle this sort of thing. And since File::Butler does all of the grunt work for you, you don't need to worry about most of it. Using File::Butler, you could re-write the above as this:

#!/usr/local/bin/perl

use strict;
use File::Butler;
use vars qw( @newstuff @files );

Butler( "general.txt", "read", \@newstuff );
Butler( "files.txt", "read", \@files );

foreach my $file ( @files ) {
    Butler( $file, "prepend", \@newstuff );
}
[download]

I hope this helps. Welcome to the Perl Fraternity, btw. We'll teach you the secret handshake later. :-)

Update: Pursuant to discussion with tilly on the use of our vs. use vars, I've modified the above code to use vars rather than our as I had done originally. I wasn't aware that our differed so much in theory and practice.

Update2: Eeeeeek! Hofmator is absolutely correct. I had undef $/; in the wrong place. Thanks for catching that, Hofmator. I moved it down a few lines, and it will work correctly now. I'm now performing undef $/; after we've read in "files.txt".

___________________
Kurt