if you use the warnings pragma:

use warnings;

it will warn you of things like OUT only being used once in the script. You also need to get into the habit of checking the success/failure of the system calls:

close(OUT) or die "Can't close OUT: $!";

or:

close(OUT) or warn "Can't close OUT: $!";

same when you open() files or do any number of things.

you can also use variables as filehandles, which gives you all the fun of variables. use a hash, iterate over it and close and delete any key you find.

ok thanks but what a hash

a hash is like an array, only it is not sorted and it's keys are strings (you can use numbers but they're treated as strings)

my %hash = ();

open($hash{'filehandle1'}, '>', 'test.txt') ¦¦ die $!;
print {$hash{'filehandle1'}} ("hello");

for my $key (keys %hash)
{
close($hash{$key}); # all filehandles are closed now
}

but of course, you should keep track of your filehandles anyhow, this is just a workaround.

ok thanks for the advice for the warnings it helped me with some of my files handles that weren't closed.