writing to file

I know it's a newbie question, but does anybody know why
the line "print OUT $aaa;" does not write onto the file OUT and "print OUT "/***\n";" does???
I'm sure it goes into the if statement 'cause i can see the line "found the function: ..." on the STDOUT.

(I also tried using $_ instead of $aaa)

I just want to put a line read from the file IN and write it onto OUT if the regexp is matched.

################# CODE #############
open (IN, "< $ARGV[$i]");
open (OUT, "> $ARGV[$i].pod");

print OUT "/***\n"; ### WORKS ###
while ($aaa=<IN>) {
print OUT "=head1 NAME\n\n";
if ($aaa =~ /^\s*function\s*\S+/) {
$aaa =~ s/^[\s]*//;
print "found the function: $aaa\n";
print OUT $aaa; ### DOES NOT WORK ###
}
close (OUT);
}
close (IN);
}
########### END OF CODE #############

Any help will be really really really appreciated.

thx in advance...

---------
eepyoga.