This is starting to bother me. I wrote up a perl script and what I had wanted to do was this

$down="false";
open (FH, $log) || $down = "true";
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I obviously got an error about trying to mod a scalar value I found a way to get what I wanted by calling subroutines instead;

use vars qw/$down/;

$down="false";
open (FH, $log) || &woops($host);
if ($down eq "false") {
....send tail of log file...
} else {
....send "server is down"
}

sub woops {
  ...do some stuff....
 $down = "true";
}
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I know this may look like a really stupid bit of perl code, I only code perl for my own enjoyment and I've only been doing it since September. What would you folks recommend? Thanks much.