I indeed tried both of those, solutions - actually, putting the array into the open statement had been the original way the code was written, but it did thre the same error. So I changed it to the * (and tried \*) - again, no dice, same problem.
Hrm.
Comment on Re^2: Using a filehandle tucked into an array
Right, but my post was a two parter. The first part was the (wrong) suggestion to try \*FILE. The second part was to suggest $f=$a[0]; <$f>; because that's the only way I ever get it to work without using IO::Handle or something.