Trying to write a specific result to a new outfile - perl

Question

I am extremely new to the Perl process. I am very much enjoying the learning curve and Perl but I am frustrated beyond belief and have spent many, many hours on one task achieving little to no results.
#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
print "Average value of retroviruses for the length of each genome and each of the genes:\n"; #create a title for the script
my $infile = "Lab1_table.txt"; # This is the file path.
open INFILE, $infile or die "Can't open $infile: $!"; # Provides an error message if the file can'tbe found.
# set my initial values.
my $tally = 0;
my #header = ();
my #averages = ();
# create my first loop to run through the file by line.
while (my $line = <INFILE>){
chomp $line;
print "$line\n";
# add one to the loop and essentially remove the header line of value.
# the first line is what was preventing me from caclulating averages as Perl can't calculate words.
my #row = split /\t/, $line; # split the file by tab characters.
$tally++; #adds one to the tally.
if ( $tally == 1 ) { #if the tally = 1 the row is determined as a the header.
#header = #row;
}
# if the tally is anything else besides 1 then it will read those rows.
else {
for( my $i = 1; $i < scalar #row; $i++ ) {
$averages[$i] += $row[$i];
}
foreach my $element (#row){
}
foreach my $i (0..4){
$averages[$i] = $averages[$i] + $row[1..4];
}
}
}
print "Average values of genome, gag, pol and env:\n";
for( my $i = 1; $i < scalar #averages; $i++ ) { # this line is used to determine the averages of the columns and print the values
print $averages[$i]/($tally-1), "\n";
}
SO, I got the results to come up with what I wanted (not in the exact format I wanted but as close as I can seem to get at the moment) and they do average the columns.
The issue now is writing to a an outfile. I am trying to get my table and results from the previous code to appear in my outfile. I get a good file name but no results.
foreach my $i (1){
my $outfile= "Average_values".".txt";
open OUTFILE, ">$outfile" or die "$outfile: $!";
print "Average values of genome, gag, pol and env:\n";
}
close OUTFILE;
close INFILE;
I feel like there is an easy way to do this and a hard way and I have taken the very hard way. Any help would be much appreciated.

Answer 1

You did not tell Perl where to print:
print OUTFILE "Average values of genome, gag, pol and env:\n";
BTW, together with use strict, also use warnings. And for working with files, use lexical filehandles and the three argument form of open:
open my $FH, '>', $filename or die $!;
print $FH 'Something';
close $FH or die $!;