in reply to FILE READ and WRITE

The error is pointed out above, but I would like to suggest that you use lexical variables instead of magic file handles. In perl 5.6 or later, instead of using barewords like FILE you can use variables like this:

use strict; my $output_file_name = "ConsumerMV.sh"; my $input_file_name = "mikels.out"; my $output_file_handle; my $input_file_handle; open( $input_file_handle, $input_file_name) or die "Unable to open input file '$input_file_name' : $!"; open( $output_file_handle, $output_file_name) or die "Unable to open output file '$output_file_name' : $!"; while (<$input_file_handle>) { do_stuff; } close $input_file; close $output_file;
IMHO this is a much cleaner way to handle file handles. It also often protects you from leaving file handles lying around. If the code above was in a sub definition (or any other block like an if () {}) the file handles would automatically be closed by perl as soon as the variables fell out of scope at the end of the block - even if you forgot to call close.