I took your code and removed the calls to the missing subs, since I don't know what they do (as they aren't posted), and it works fine for me... as follows:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

get_section('E0209.dat','F0210.dat','H0211.dat');

sub get_section {
  $docdir = "./";
  print join ':', @_ , "\n";
  for (@_) {
    print ;
    /\.dat/ && do {
      $file = join '/', ($docdir, $_);
      $pubdate = substr ($_, 1, 4);
      print "$file \:\: $pubdate\n" ;
    } ;
  }
}
[download]

And I add back in your other calls, and add stub code, and it still works fine for me. ??

--
bliz