I found the problem...thanks to everyone who helped. The problem was tha the 'htmlcal.txt' file I was trying to read from was not properly closed out by a Perl library file that my script called.

Sorry for the stupidity. When I was in the Navy on submarines, we had a term similar to newbies: "NUB". It stood for "Non-Useful Body". New submariners didn't know how to do anything and they were always asking stupid questions. I feel the same way now as I did when I was a NUB on a sub. Here I guess a "NUPP" would be more appropriate: "Non-Useful Perl Programmer".