to add on to that thorough explanation provided by chromatic, it's normally recommended you use uppercase filehandles. in this case 'test' should probably be 'TEST'. without the quote-dealies, of course. just to eliminate all ambiguity, the code would look like this:

open(TEST, ">test.html") or die "Cannot open test.html for writing: $!
+\n";
flock TEST, 2;
print TEST "Whatever you want to say";
close(TEST);
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