Actually, part of the beauty of this idiom is that you get Perl itself to check for file existence and to report better than average error messages.

Oh, I like this idiom, but strictly in stand-alone scripts. Bombing out of a program deep inside some library doesn't sit well with me.

And Perl exits with the following error message if the file doesn't exist using this idiom:
Can't open /does/not/exist: No such file or directory.
Uhm. I can do that :-)

Yes, it doesn't seem hard at all does it? (:

It includes a description of what was being attempted ("open", though I'd probably opt for metioning that "read" access is what was required -- though I can understand not wanting to confuse people into thinking it was a read operation that failed while keeping the message short), the input data to the operation (the name of the file), and the correct error code indicating why it failed ($! in this case).

Unfortunately, that still makes it above average in my experience. ):

        - tye (who doesn't like error messages a la mode)