This is good advice, and good questions.
No, I'm not sure that it's not a logic issue. It's running on Linux, Perl 5.005_03. And the text editor doesn't have anything to do with it, since when I'd grep the text file for a pattern which is SUPPOSED to be there, it wouldn't show up. And again - the only thing touching these files were perl scripts.

There are, however, a few things going on in the script which could have some consequences... primarily, my former bad habit of open,flock,read,close followed by open,flock,write, close rather than rewinding the file, writing, truncating, and closing.

Further research leads me to realize that the dates contained within the records indicate that nothing past a certain date was appearing, and since new records are simply appended to the file, you might indeed be right that this is a flocking issue.

Notwithstanding my confidence in my ability to use FLOCK, I still think I made some mistakes, and I appreciate Tilly's soft criticism which made me re-think my methods.

I think I'll go look at and fix some code. I humbly thank all of you for your research and insight. :-)

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