You've got several problems here:

• you do a Perl 'open' on the file
• you then do a Unix redirect to the file (which perl now has open - dangerous)
• your Unix redirect doesn't append, it overwrites - you need a '>>' instead of a '>' before 'pingall.list' in your system call
• then you don't close the file before opening it for read. This is not strictly a bad thing, but you should do this for neatness sake

So, what I think is happening is that Perl has the file open, then you use system calls to write to it. Then you do the second Perl open, which causes perl to flush out what it thinks should be in the file (which is nothing) and so you land up with an empty file.

check out Net::Ping for an easier way to do the pinging

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