G'day amma,

That's probably not the best way to go. You have no error checking so you won't know which file handles in @handles are actually opened. The association between filename and file handle is through an index which is assumed to be common. You've shown no reason why you want to generate an array of file handles.

You haven't shown sufficient context to provide more than a rough answer; however, I think code like this would probably be a better solution:

...
for my $file (@files) {
    open my $fh, '<', $file or die $!;

    while (<$fh>) {
        if (/a particular pattern/) {
            print "Pattern found in $file\n";
            last;
        }
    }

    close $fh;
}
...
[download]

If you have a legitimate requirement to use the code you posted, then you'll need something closer to this:

...
my @handles = map { open my $fh, '<', $_; $fh } @files;

for my $index (0 .. $#files) {
    next unless $handles[$index]->opened();

    while (<$handles[$index]>) {
        if (/a particular pattern/) {
            print "Pattern found in $files[$index]\n";
            last;
        }
    }
}

close $_ for grep { $_->opened() } @handles;
...
[download]