A few other issues: this line $key =~ /^(.)/; does nothing because you neither check for success of this match or use the successful result of $1. You can use a slightly different regex to do the job of getting the first letter and checking that it is lower case (I presume that you want to skip proper names like Bob?). That way writeFiles() doesn't have to do that job and it won't need a for loop.

Also $line should be passed as a parameter to writeFiles - try to minimize the number of global variables.

This code will work, but opening a file is "expensive". Further work could result in only opening each file one time.

Also if you had enabled warnings and strictures, you would see that this line
for ($i; $i<26; $i++); is not right. Also an indexed C style for loop is relatively rare in Perl. for my $letter (a..z){} would be more common in this situation - but as mentioned before, even that is not necessary.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;

my %dictionary = ('dog' => 'pet', 'horse' =>'animal', 
                  'doggie' => 'also a pet',
                  'Bob' => 'person');

sortDictionary();

sub sortDictionary 
{
   foreach my $key (sort keys %dictionary) 
   {
     # process only keys with lower case first letter
     # e.g. 'Bob' => 'person' would be skipped
     
     my $first_letter;
     next unless (($first_letter) = $key =~ /^([a-z])/); 
      
     my $line = $key . '/' . $dictionary{$key};
     print "processing line: $line\n";
      
     writeFiles( $first_letter, $line);
   }
}

sub writeFiles 
{
   my ($first_letter, $line) = @_;
   
   my $filename = $first_letter . "_words.txt";
   print "file: $filename adding $line\n";
   
   open FILE, '>>', $filename or die "can not open $filename $!";
   print FILE "$line\n";
   close FILE;
      
   return;
}

__END__
processing line: dog/pet
file: d_words.txt adding dog/pet
processing line: doggie/also a pet
file: d_words.txt adding doggie/also a pet
processing line: horse/animal
file: h_words.txt adding horse/animal
[download]

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