Update: This post contains some inaccuracies, which Tye points out in a reply below. Read both posts.

To me, this really sounds like you want to accomplish several steps :

1. Read $thenumber from a file.
2. Print $thenumber
3. Increment $thenumber
4. Write the new value of $thenumber back to the file

And it seems like you want to do this for a web counter CGI program.

The solution is available in the form of the File::CounterFile module. This maintains a counter file which does the counting for you.

If you think rolling your own version is the better solution, keep the following problems in mind :

• Concurrency: If two users simultaneously access your counter CGI, they will see the same counter value. Hits may be lost on an overloaded machine, if one counter program runs much slower than several others.
• Security: Your program is writing to a file on your system. This always means that you must take special care not to open up any security holes, like overwriting the wrong files.

Update: On rereading your question, I haven't answered your actual questions. Your code

open(COUNTTHIS, "< $counttext") or die "I can't open counttext: $!\n";

print(<COUNTTHIS>);
[download]

opens the file with the name contained in $counttext and prints the first line of it. The next line in your code,

$thenumber = <COUNTTHIS>;  #I thought something like this, but no
[download]

reads the second line from the file COUNTTHIS, and stores it in $thenumber. What you propably wanted to do was to read a single line from COUNTTHIS, print it, and store it in $thenumber, like this :

print (<COUNTTHIS>);
$thenumber = $_;

# or, alternatively, like this :
$thenumber = <COUNTTHIS>;
print $thenumber;
[download]