open doesn't consume significant amount of memory. It will be something else. I would suggest usual culprits in this scenario are:

• foreach ( <$file_handle>) { which reads the whole file into an array before iterating. You should use while instead
• Too wide scope on something that's getting updated as part of your processing - and thus steadily growing as each file is processed.
• use strict; use warnings are just generally a good idea - the snippet you quote doesn't seem to suggest it's doing that.

Of course - without some SAMPLE CODE - we can only speculate as to what's causing your problem. It isn't open though.

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