You might consider an inplace edit instead:

#!/usr/bin/perl
$^I = ".bak";
$/ = undef;
while (<>) {
  print STDOUT "$ARGV is being cleaned!\n";
  my $h = HTML::Clean->new($_, 9);
  $h->compat;
  $h->strip;
  print ${$h->data};
}
[download]

Now you get backups with ".bak" automatically. Good if something messes up.

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker