); : ` close(); : ` close(); : ` close(); : ` close(); : : All these closes are wrong. : You have to say close (FILEHANDLE), not close (). Use of perl -w would have spotlighted this. : What happens in the case of NARCRC, is that you read an extra line : , which apparently reads a new buffer into memory. The buffer is : then written out when perl stops. The resulting string is used as an : argument for close. I would say that close should accept only filehandles : as parameters, not strings. I have no idea what close does with a string : parameters. Maybe it is an oversight in perl to accept this. This may well : depend on your particular stdio implementation. To quote the manual under close: FILEHANDLE may be an expression whose value gives the real filehandle name. This is to support indirect filehandles. If somebody wants the expression to return the next filehandle from a file, that's up to them. I guess it's a case of "Live Free AND Die". Use -w. Larry