Full marks for using warnings, strict, checking the results of opening your files and posting what you have so far. Assuming that you want to check each line in classified1_sports.dat for the string "unclassified" in lower case then print to good.dat if it is there or bad.dat if it is not then a few minor changes to your code and you are rocking:

#!/usr/bin/perl 
use warnings;
use strict;

# open 3 filehandles
open Classified, "c:/begperl/classified1_sports.dat" or die "Error mes
+sage here: $!\n";
open Good, ">c:/begperl/good.dat" or die "Error message here: $!\n";
open Bad, ">c:/begperl/bad.dat" or die "Error message here: $!\n";

# read the classified1_sprots.dat file a line at a time
while (<Classified>){
    my $line = $_;                    # we get the line in $_
    if ( $line =~ m/unclassified/ ) { # use a match regex to check for
+ string
        print Good $line;             # print $line to filehandle Good
    } else {
        print Bad $line;              # print $line to filehandle Bad
    }
}

# close our files when finished with them
close Classified;
close Good;
close Bad;
[download]

cheers

tachyon

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