I am just commending to avoid confusion, OP on the open function has write mode > instead of read mode <.
Because the OP opens this file with the intent of writing data to it, as shown in this code line: 
print $fh $count;

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So there is really nothing wrong with that.

The OP code is reading from a file (passed as an argument to the program) and writing to another, opened explicitly with the open command.

In reply to Re^4: How to amend character count. by Laurent_R
in thread How to amend character count. by Peter Keystrokes

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