Are you sure it's not the contents of %classHash? Your code seems to work just fine (eg, the snippet below works).

    open(TEST, ">>test.html") || die;

    my $outhandle = undef;
    $outhandle = *TEST;

    print $outhandle "test\n";
    close($outhandle);
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If you replace the consecutive classHash tests with an if/elsif/else die, you should catch this.