can't write to a file in Linux, can in Unix....?

[Brian Volk]

Hello, 

I'm a rookie to perl as well as Linux and I'm stumped.  Hopefully you can help me out. 
 I've been reading a book on perl and in the book there are sample programs that I'm 
testing out.

Here's the problem... I'm running RedHat 6.2, Perl 5.6 and I'm using the bash shell.  
First off, I can not run a perl program by typing ../program.pl, instead I have to 
type; perl program.pl. which is O.K., but I don't like it... :-) I checked my 
.bash_profile and I have /usr/bin: in my $PATH... ???   Here's the bigger problem... 
When I run write_test.pl (program below) it will not pull the data from test.txt and 
write it to outfile... It is not creating the outfile either... Now I know the program 
works because I have logged into my shell account (came w/ hosting account) and it 
works just fine.  My first thought was permissions, but the program doesn't give any 
error messages...   Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.
 
Thanks,

Brian 

 #!/bin/perl

$datafile = "/files/perl/test.txt";
$resultfile = ">/files/perl/outfile.txt";  # Note the '>' charater.
open(DATAFILE, $datafile);
open(OUTPUTFILE, $resultfile);

while (<DATAFILE>) {
        chomp;
         print OUTPUTFILE;
        print OUTPUTFILE "\n";
}