Why not use File::Slurp?

One reason is what hippo said, the other being that this is IMO one of those cases where pure Perl does everything I need - I can read lines in list context and I can use layers like :raw, :crlf, and :encoding(...) - there's really no need to load a module. (Unless I'm doing additional stuff, like filename manipulation, in which case I usually use Path::Class, which has slurping and spewing built in.)