Hi dudley.

I felt compelled to offer a little advice. In your open / close functions, I would include some minor modifications in the event of failure (hardware related, etc.).

open(FILE, $filein) or die "Couldn't open file $filein : $!\n"; 

close (FILE) or die "Couldn't close file : $!\n";


open (NEW, ">$filein") or die "Couldn't open $filein : $!\n";

close (NEW) or die "Couldn't close file: $!\n";
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Even though perl will close filehandles for you, I feel it is unwise to not explicitly check for success / failure.

Hope this helps,
-Katie