Thanks everyone for your replies! :-) For completeness, here are some slurping examples, incorporating various suggestions:

• The basic version (with the improved error message first suggested by haj):

  my $data = do { open my $fh, '<', $file or die "$file: $!";
      local $/; <$fh> };
  [download]

• Opening a file with an encoding (in this case UTF-8):

  my $data = do { open my $fh, '<:raw:encoding(UTF-8)', $file
      or die "$file: $!"; local $/; <$fh> };
  [download]

• A version that should use less memory, suggested by BrowserUk (see this discussion - Copy-On-Write, available in newer Perls, may take care of this):

  my $data; { open my $fh, '<', $file or die "$file: $!";
      local $/; $data = <$fh> };
  [download]

• This short version, first suggested by tybalt89, however, note that as opposed to the above examples, this does not die but only emits a warning if the file could not be opened (unless FATAL warnings are in effect, the minimum needed is use warnings FATAL=>'inplace';; Update: fixed as per choroba's reply, thanks!):

  my $data = do { local (*ARGV,$/); @ARGV=$file; <> };
  [download]

Minor edits for clarity.

Update 2: Actually, I made a mistake in the last example when I first fixed it, it is now tested and correct.