Re: Opening and closing files in loop

[Corion]

You don't show the value(s) of $i and $max, so maybe there is a simple reason why your loop only gets run once.

Personally, I would change the coding style in two places to avoid nasty errors:

First, I would not use the C-style for construct but iterate over a range. I'd also use a lexical $i to avoid clobbering the loop counter through side-effects:

for my $i (1..$max) {
    ...
};

Second, I would avoid using select for choosing the active output handle and print to the filehandles directly:

    print DB qq("$dept$w$i, ..."\n);
    print newDB qq("$dept$w$i, ..."\n);

While rewriting your code to the new idiom, I saw that you seem to be running without warnings. As soon as you add use warnings; to the top of your script, or add -w to the Perl invocation, Perl will tell you what is going wrong.