On top of my OO confusion, I was getting led further astray by my overlooking the global nature of filehandles, and my mistaken way of trying to store them in a hash. Got there in the end ... by storing a reference to the file handle in a hash 
use FileHandle;
my $FH = FileHandle->new(">>$self->{output_file}");
$self->{file_handle} = \$FH;

[download]
and used in other methods like this 
my $FH = ${$self->{file_handle}};    
print $FH "some text\n" ;

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Thanks again for all the pointers.

In reply to Re: Re: Re: creating 2 file writing objects by postman
in thread creating 2 file writing objects by postman

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