You might be better off to use a lexical hash to hold your filehandles rather than $1. You also ought to cater for the possibility of lines that don't match your pattern. I have changed your pattern, substituting a negated character class ([^\t]+) for your non-greedy .*? as that is perhaps safer.

In the code below I use a HEREDOC as my input and references to scalars (actually hash values) as my output just to avoid creating loads of files on my disk; the principle will work just as well with real files.

use strict;
use warnings;

open my $alusFH, q{<}, \ <<EOD or die qq{open: << HEREDOC: $!\n};
chrabc123    blah    blah
chrdef456    burble    blurgh
Duff line to be rejected
chrabc123    rootle    tootle
EOD

my %seen;
my %fileHandles;
my %outputFiles;

while ( <$alusFH> )
{
    if ( m{^(chr[^\t]+)\t} )
    {
        do {
           open $fileHandles{ $1 }, q{>}, \ $outputFiles{ $1 }
              or die qq{open: > scalar ref.: \n};
           } unless $seen{ $1 } ++;
        print { $fileHandles{ $1 } } $_;
    }
    else
    {
        warn qq{Bad line: $_};
    }
}

close $alusFH or die qq{close: << HEREDOC: $!\n};
do {
   close $fileHandles{ $_ }
      or die qq{close: > scalar ref.: \n};
   } for keys %fileHandles;

print qq{$_:\n\n$outputFiles{ $_ }----------\n}
   for sort keys %outputFiles;

[download]

Here's the output.

Bad line: Duff line to be rejected
chrabc123:

chrabc123    blah    blah
chrabc123    rootle    tootle
----------
chrdef456:

chrdef456    burble    blurgh
----------

[download]

I hope this is of interest.

Cheers,

JohnGG

In reply to Re: varaible to filehandle -alack! by johngg
in thread varaible to filehandle -alack! by maayanster

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