note rubasov All of your hash keys (just the keys, not the values) will be stringified in perl5, so you cannot store a filehandle (or a reference) in a hash key (a hash key is a string, not a scalar variable for general use). Try to store these somewhere else, depending on your data structure for instance: <code> %radar = (some_id => [$fileh, $repoch], some_other_id => [$fileh2, $repoch2], ...) </code> 824298 824298