Hello all- I come again with a question about some trouble i am having with file handles and running two different loops

so here is the code:

print "What is input file name?: ";
    chomp($input = <STDIN>);
print "What is output file name: ";
    chomp($output = <STDIN>);

open (INPUT, "$input") || die "died opening input\n";#opening up ngc18
+8cata and putting it into INPUT#

open (STDOUT, ">$output") || die "died opening output\n"; #opening up 
+ngc188cat2 and setting output of out#

$cfo = "O";
$status = "STATUS=OK";
$m = "^M";

open (INTER, ">>fred");

while ($inline = <INPUT>) {
 #INPUT defined as variable#
 @mag = split(/\s+/, $inline); #firstline of array defined by split of
+ white space into variable inline#
#############################################

if ($mag[12] >= 12  && $mag[12] <= 20) {
     print INTER "$inline"; #printing to INTER 
}
}

 while ($sep = <INTER>) {
     @firstline = split(/\s+/, $sep);

$hms1 = $firstline[2];
$rah2 = ($hms1 / 15);
 $rah3 = int($rah2);

$ram1 = ( abs($rah2 - $rah3) )* 60;
$ram2 = int($ram1);

$ras1 = abs($ram1 - $ram2) * 60;
$ras2 = sprintf "%-02.3f", $ras1 ;

 $hms2 = $firstline[3];
 $hh2 = sprintf "%1d", ($hms2);
 $mm2 = sprintf "%02d", (60*( abs($hms2) - abs($hh2) ) );
 $ss2 = sprintf "%-02.2f", 3600*abs($hms2) - 3600*abs($hh2) - 60*abs($
+mm2);

$obid = "NGC 188 - $firstline[1]";    

write; #writing to STDOUT
} 

close INPUT;

[download]
The rest of the code after this point is working fine, so i am not going to bother you all with it. In the first "if" loop, i am trying to take information from with in the dataset i was given, and I want this dataset to be printed only if a certain column(the 12th in this case) has values between say 12 and 16. If it does, then I want to run that new dataset(contain the true values) through the rest of the program. If it does not, then i dont really care where it goes. I hope this makes sense.

So I am not sure if my control structure is any good or not, or if this can all be done in one loop rather than in two loops. So i am a little bit confused about opening up a filehandle here... i understand the input and output ones above, but opening an "intermediate one" (like INTER) is confusing me. I figured that might have been the easiest way. So my question would be, can this all be done in one loop rather than two loops? Is my "if" loop wrong? Did i open the INTER filehandle properly? did i print properly? and any other general comments or critisms(including my poor english )

Thank you very much! Steve

In reply to Running two loops by srkaeppler

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