Update: This post contains some inaccuracies, which Tye points out in a reply below. Read both posts.

To me, this really sounds like you want to accomplish several steps :

1. Read $thenumber from a file.
2. Print $thenumber
3. Increment $thenumber
4. Write the new value of $thenumber back to the file

The solution is available in the form of the File::CounterFile module. This maintains a counter file which does the counting for you.

If you think rolling your own version is the better solution, keep the following problems in mind :

• Concurrency: If two users simultaneously access your counter CGI, they will see the same counter value. Hits may be lost on an overloaded machine, if one counter program runs much slower than several others.
• Security: Your program is writing to a file on your system. This always means that you must take special care not to open up any security holes, like overwriting the wrong files.

Update: On rereading your question, I haven't answered your actual questions. Your code

open(COUNTTHIS, "< $counttext") or die "I can't open counttext: $!\n";

print(<COUNTTHIS>);
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$thenumber = <COUNTTHIS>;  #I thought something like this, but no
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print (<COUNTTHIS>);
$thenumber = $_;

# or, alternatively, like this :
$thenumber = <COUNTTHIS>;
print $thenumber;
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A couple of notes:

print( <COUNTTHIS> );
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prints the entire contents of the open file since <> in an array context reads all remaining lines.

print (<COUNTTHIS>);
$thenumber = $_;
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The first line above doesn't set $_ like while(<COUNTTHIS>) does. So the second line doesn't leave $thenumber set properly.

$thenumber = <COUNTTHIS>;
print $thenumber;
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This version fixes all of these problems.
        - tye (but my friends call me "Tye")

#!/usr/local/bin/perl -w
use strict
print "Content-type: text/html\n\n";
my $counttext = 'd:/xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx/perl/thecounter/counttext.txt';
my $thenumber;
open(COUNTTHIS, "< $counttext") or die "I can't open counttext: $!\n";
$thenumber = <COUNTTHIS>;
close(COUNTTHIS);
print "$thenumber<br>";
++$thenumber;
print "$thenumber";
open(OUT, "> $counttext") or die "I can't open counttext: $!\n";
print OUT $thenumber;
close(OUT);
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Thanks alot to both of you.