Zaxo was on the money with readline() - all i needed was to get underneath the abstraction of the <FH> operator. 
package FileClerk;

open (FH,$file);

sub next_line {
  return (readline(*FH));
}

[download]
calling program: 
use FileClerk;
for (FileClerk::next_line()) {
    print "$_\n";
}

[download]
The calling program doesn't need to care about the filehandle, which was my aim. Thanks everyone.

In reply to Re: (Ovid) Re: need nextline() sub by mutagen
in thread need nextline() sub by mutagen

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