It probably won't matter here, but that's a bad idea in general since you open up yourself to a race condition: the file might be created after the -e test but before the open by another process. You need an atomic operation: 
if (open FH, "<", $file) {
    # read it and do stuff
    open FH, ">", $file or die "Failed: $! trying to re-open $file\n";
}
else {
    # do stuff
    open FH, ">", $file  or die "Failed: $! trying to create new $file
+\n";
}

[download]
Also, use the three-argument form of open as I've said elsewhere in this thread.

Makeshifts last the longest.

In reply to Re^2: To die or not to die by Aristotle
in thread To die or not to die by Popcorn Dave

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