in reply to Apache 2, Perl 5.8.0, Netware 6.5 server reboots

That doesn't work because the || operator has very different precedence than the "or" operator, which is what you should be using. See perlop for more information.

open FILE, "243q1_14.txt" or die "Cannot open file: $!";

That will at least give you an error message if something goes wrong.