Your parens are wrong, for one thing. And I don’t see how the code you have could do that, since you are not opening a filehandle that contains a string. The correct parenning is:

open(RESULT, ">> somewhere") || die "can't append to somewhere: $!";
[download]

Without seeing more of your code, I can’t say what’s really going on. It looks like you assigned to the global variable $RESULT the string ">> somewhere" and then tried to open that using the single argument form of open. For example:

$RESULT = ">> somewhere";
open(RESULT) || die "can't append to $RESULT: $!";
[download]

Is that what you did? If so why?

And what is with the screwy `cat` business, anyway? :(