Re: reading N files

[Solo]

I have a need to read N files one line at a time and then manipulate those individual lines

The diamond operator also works for this, and is much simpler, IMO.

use strict;
use warnings;
use English;

print "Usage: $0 output input1 input2 ...\n";

my $outfile = shift @ARGV;
open(OUT, ">$outfile") || die "Can't open $outfile for writing: $!\n";

while(<>){
    # $_ contains line
}

Simplicity is in the eye of the beholder, of course. YMMV.

Update: Later posts make it clear the OP wanted to process each file's line N before moving to each file's line N+1. Obviously, the diamond operator is not very useful for that behavior.