Oh, that's a great point. The basic problem is that if the file does exist but cannot be opened for reading, yet can be opened for output, my method will clobber what's there and then continue looping forever.

I suppose that's why I should have just used the '-e' function:

if ( -e $filename ) {
    open FH, "<$filename" or die $!;
} else {
    open FH, ">$filename" or die $!;
    close FH;
    open FH, "<$filename" or die $!;
}
[download]

At least this eliminates the potential for the endless loop.