[MacPerl] bad file handle

[Jeffrey Dawkins <batcomp@teleport.com>]

I've been working through the examples in Eric Herrmann's book "Teach 
yourself cgi programming with perl in a week" (a wonderfully informative 
book btw) and I seem to be having problems with Listing 5.11 a script for 
comparing data from a database with the cgi form input.  I've loaded it 
onto my unix server and I keep getting this error message when I try to 
run it from the command line:

"bad symbol for filehandle" line 5
the code is the call to open the database.

#!/usr/local/bin/perl
push(@INC, "/cgi-bin");
require("cgi-lib.pl");
&ReadParse(*input);
open($PRICE_FILE, "../sys2.txt");
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
while (<$PRICE_FILE>) {
chop;
($item, $price) = split(/:/,$_,2) ;
}

I wondering why I can't seem to open the database. I've set permissions 
on the db file to 766 so it should be readable to the httpd. 

If anyone knows this program and has tried to run  it or if you see the 
problem please let me know. Thank you

Jeffrey Dawkins                         batcomp@teleport.com
Tiger Strikes Media             http://www.teleport.com/~batcomp/tsm.site/