Hello mbgbioinfo,

There is another problem with the code shown — in this snippet:

open(MYFILE, "<words") or die "Opening words: $!";
print MYFILE @words;
close(MYFILE);
[download]

the file “words” is opened for reading, but you attempt to write to it.

BTW, there is no need to close the filehandle and then re-open it. Open it once, for reading and writing, write to it, then reposition the filehandle to the beginning of the file before reading:

my $filename = 'words';
open(my $myfile, '+>', $filename)
    or die "Cannot open file '$filename' for writing and reading: $!";
print $myfile @words;

seek($myfile, 0, SEEK_SET);
srand;
rand($.) < 1 and $line = $_ while <$myfile>;
close $myfile
    or die "Cannot close file '$filename': $!";
[download]

Notes:

• Prefer the 3-argument form of open.
• Prefer a lexical filehandle (my $myfile) to a global (MYFILE).
• It is more common to open a file for reading and writing using the mode +<, but in this case, if the file is not already empty, you want to clobber (erase) its contents before writing to it; hence the mode +>.

Hope that helps,

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