The snippet doesn't compress nicely. Now, if you had more repetition, we might be able to do something. If this is just a sample of your code and you have more repetitiion in your real code, can you show it to us? I can't predict how this code would expand.

You could let Perl close the handles for you:

{
   local *FH;  open(FH,  "< ${file}.txt")  or die "Can't open ${file}.
+txt: $!\n";
   local *FH1; open(FH1, "> ${file}1.txt") or die "Can't create ${file
+}1.txt: $!\n";

   while(<FH>) { print FH1 $_; }
}
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or in newer versions of Perl:

{
   open(my $fh,  '<', "${file}.txt")  or die "Can't open ${file}.txt: 
+$!\n";
   open(my $fh1, '>', "${file}1.txt") or die "Can't create ${file}1.tx
+t: $!\n";

   while (<$fh>) { print $fh1 $_; }
}
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But here is the answer to the question you asked. As I've said, it's not very useful.

my @file_data = (
   [ undef, "${file}.txt",  'r' ],
   [ undef, "${file}1.txt", 'w' ],
);

foreach (@file_data) {
   my $name = $_->[1];
   my $mode = $_->[2];

   $_->[0] = IO::File->new($name, $mode)
   or die("Can't " . ($mode eq 'w' ? 'create' : 'open') . " file $name
+: $!\n");
}

while (<$file_data[0][0]>) { print $file_data[1][0] $_; }

close($_->[0])
  foreach @file_data;
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Rightoh!
Yes, i like the auto-close solution here!
What i was probing was something like :


foreach my $i ("" "1") {
open (FH$i,  "<${file}$i.txt") or die "${file}$i.txt"; }
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but of course file handle names don't work that way.

I like your general "foreach solution" too, but, yes, that's overkill for this specific snippet.
Thanks for lightening up my understanding
best regards, allan

There are two problems with that:

1) Creating symbols dynamically (FH$i) is pretty bad. I think you could use $FH{$i} instead (since Perl 5.6?), but your loop would become
while (<$FH{''}>) { print $FH{1} $_; }

2) You're opening both files for reading.