What's wrong with this: 
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;

my %files;
while (<DATA>) {
    $_=~/^(\w+): (\d) (\w+)/;
    unless ($files{$1}) { open $files{$1}, ">$1.tmp" || die "Couldn't 
+open $1.txt...\n"; }
    print $files{$1} "$2 $3\n"; #  No dice! (syntax error)
}

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The files do get created. I tried IO::File to create the handle but it is the same deal; I've used scalars this way before so way not a hash element?

In reply to hash element as file handle by halfcountplus

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