I've been picking the camel and my brain for a solution to this, but nothing's been helpful nor apparent.

I'm trying to read from a small file (hits), containing only an integer, increment it, and then write it back to the file. Unfortunately, what $hits prints ends up being "1318131813181318" after a few consecutive executions, although I have a feeling this is a result of the mode I used in opening HITSW. I wrote two subroutines because &read_hits() always needs to be executed with the script, and &write_hits() only needs to be executed on certain occasions. I would appreciate your thoughts and solutions to my problem. Thanks in advance. 

sub write_hits {
  open (HITSW, "+< $_[0]");
  my $read_hits = <HITSW>;
  print HITSW $read_hits++;
  close (HITSW);
}

sub read_hits {
  open (HITSR,"$_[0]");
  my $read_number = <HITSR>;
  close (HITSR);
  return $read_number;
}

&write_hits("hits");

my $hits = &read_hits("hits");
print "$hits visitors";

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In reply to Reading and incrementing an integer by echosilex

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