You are not storing your user object data in your object and you are not calling methods as methods but as subroutines, using the &routine syntax that has some really nasty side-effects.

Some pointers:

use strict; would have kicked your ass :-)

Your constructor should be something like:

use Symbol;

sub new {
    my $class_name = shift;
    $classname = ref($classname) || $classname;
    my $self = {
       "output_file" => shift,
       "append"      => shift,
       "file_handle" => gensym(),
    }
    bless ($self,$class_name);
    return $self;     
}
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use Symbol; and gensym() are put in here for backward compatibility to perls before 5.6 - see the Symbol manpage

And methods should be called and constructed like:

     $object->method($arg1,$arg2);

     sub method {
          my $self = shift;
          my $arg1 = shift;
          my $arg2 = shift;
          print "append is ",$self->{"append"},"\n";
          $self->other_method($arg2);
     }
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Take a look at perldoc perltoot and/or get your hands on the 'programming perl' book

Update: changed $append and friends to "append" - that should actually work :-)

also added some code to show the retrieval of object data.

-- 
Joost       downtime n. The period during which a system
            is error-free and immune from user input.
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