It is because you are using "$recno^$qno^$vtext"; in your print statement, but they aren't declared in the block.

For Example:

my $a = <STDIN>;
if($a eq 'y'){
  my ($fname, $lname) = ('tom', 'test');
  print "$fname $lname\n"; #OK because vars declared in block
}

print "$fname $lname\n"; #Vars are out of scope now, will die under st
+rict
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Your code should look something like this, so your vars can be used between loop iterations.

#!/usr/bin/perl 
use strict;
use warnings; 
open (IN, "infile") or die "Can't open input file: $!\n";
open (OUT, ">outfile") or die "Can't create outfile for write: $!\n ";
my ($junk,$qno,$junk2,$vtext,$recno);
while (<IN>) {                         
  if (/^##recstart/) {           
    ($junk,$recno) = split;
    $recno =~ s/'//g;      
  }elsif (/^##v/) {
    ($junk,$qno,$junk2,$vtext) = split (/ /,$_,4);
    $qno =~ s/'//g;  
    $vtext =~ s/'//g;
  }else {                                  
    print OUT "$recno^$qno^$vtext";
  }     
}
[download]