• #11940 You said `It doesn't work'. The next violation will be punished by death.

MJD's Good Advice and Maxims for Programmers.

By the way, you really should not be trying to write C in Perl. Get a copy of Learning Perl today, read tonight, write Perl in Perl tomorrow.

One individual already pointed out the chomp issue. I also recommend that you check $! after open to determine if the cause of failure is what you expect. If you wish to handle one potential cause by looping, that's great. But for unrelated causes of failure you would still want to thrown an exception or an alternate handler.