{
  local @ARGV = @list_of_files;
  while (<>) {
    ...
  }
}
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Honestly, it smells like home work.

map {open IN,"$_";undef $/; $all_files_data .= <IN>;close IN;} @files;

print "$all_files_data";
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regards
Franklin

Well,what I'm trying to do is to remove the for loop and just have all the file contents under a single handles....again if that's possible. I'll try Franklin's suggestion and see how it works

It's possible, but it's a real hack, involving @ARGV and the magic <> construct. (I won't tell you how to do it because if you're not clever enough to find it with those hints, you're not clever enough to know not to use it.) You're really better off simply using a loop. The correct way to code that loop would probably be like this:

my @lines;
foreach my $file(@files) {
    open(IN, "< $file") or die "Can't open $file: $!";
    push @lines, <IN>;
    close IN;
}
# Now do whatever you want with @lines
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Alternatively, remove all references to @lines and replace the push line with:

    while(my $line = <IN>) {
        #Do whatever processing you want with $line
    }
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Hope this helps,

No, because perl can only have 256 handles open at once and they have to be named in capital letters and there are only 26 of those.

If you want to open more files you can use ruby which has first-class filehandles

@list #contains list filenames
@handle = @list.map {|n| 
  File.new(n) 
}
for h in @handle
  @data = h.readlines
end
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There's also a trick (ref. 483243 and 544184) to open multiple files: `cat filename1 filename2` but that only works in unix and has to read everything to memory so I don't recommend to do it in production code.

(This reply is meant to be a bad joke. Don't take it seriously, instead read holli's reply. I think too that this is an XY problem. You can open multiple filehandles simultanously, using lexical filehandles (or Symbol). There's however no need for that if all you want is to read the data from all of them, as you can open the files sequentially: you can reuse a filehandle by reopening it (which will close the previous file).)