.... you are free to write use bareword::filehandles

Thanks for pointing that out.

And thanks to everyone for all the additional relevant points and information.

I don't do much with perl filehandles, but when I do, I've generally used barewords.
I thought I would have made every dumb mistake that was possible with them, but I can see there are some mistakes that I hadn't encountered.
(I wonder if that implies that I'm actually smarter than I thought ;-)

Cheers,
Rob