You seem to want to write lines with the same time stamp to the same file, right? And when a line has a new date you need to close the old file and open the new one, right?

If that is the case, just remember the time of the previous line. If that is different than that of the new line, open a new file. And since opening with '>>' also creates a file you don't have to test for existence of the file.

my $previous_time='';
while (1) {
  #get line of code $new_line
  #get line's date stamp $line_time

  if ($line_time ne $previous_time) {
    close(CURRENT_FILE) if ($previous_time); #could be left out since 
+opening a new file closes the old
    open(CURRENT_FILE, ">>$DATA_DIRECTORY".$line_time.".ascii") or 
      die "$line_time.ascii could not be created\n";
    $previous_time= $line_time;
  }

  print CURRENT_FILE $new_line:
}
[download]

Thanks to both of you guys - you really know your stuff! Jethro, you nailed it right on the money there, and roboticus, that was a good assumption not to be limited to the number of files being open at a time, although in this case the data comes in as real time. Both of these are great to work with and have tricks that I would do well to remember.

Thanks again!

ThirtySecondNoob:

You're not that far off with your attempt. You're going through a few unnecessary steps to check whether the file is open and for storing the file handle, though. I've cleaned up your example a little, here (usual disclaimers apply):

my $prev_file_name;
my $file;
while(1)
{
   my $new_line = get_line_of_code();
   my $line_time = get_date_stamp($new_line);

   my $file_name = "$DATA_DIRECTORY$line_time.ascii";
   if (defined($prev_file_name) and $prev_file_name != $file_name) {
      close($file) if defined $file;
      open $file, '>>', $file_name
        or print "$file_name could not be created\n";
   }

   #add line to $NEW_FILE
   print $file $new_line."\n"
     or print "data COULDNT be printed to CURRENT_FILE\n";

   # This bit seems to be related to code you've pruned from
   # your example...
   #} else {
   #   #write to file and send
   #   $file = $fileholder[0];
   #   print $file $new_line;
   #}
} #end of while loop
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While going through your example, though, I feel it's possible you may have trimmed a bit too much from it. In case you wanted to keep several different files open at once (such as for processing interleaved requests), you might want something like this:

my $MAX_FILES=10; # Max open files we want
my %files;        # We can keep multiple file handles
while(1)
{
   my $new_line = get_line_of_code();
   my $line_time = get_date_stamp($new_line);

   my $file_name = "$DATA_DIRECTORY$line_time.ascii";
   if (!exists $files{$file_name}) {
      # close a file if we have too many
      my @filenames = keys %files;
      if (@filenames >= $MAX_FILES) {
         my $t = $files{$filenames[0]};
         close $t or die $!;
         delete $files{$filenames[0]};
      }

      open $files{$file_name}, '>>', $filename
        or print "$file_name could not be created\n";
   }

   $file = $files{$file_name};
   print $file $new_line."\n"
     or print "data COULDNT be printed to CURRENT_FILE\n";
} #end of while loop
[download]

...roboticus