Do not use parse (it'll break your script on fields with newlines). Use getline instead!

Ah, good point. Funny, my first iteration of the script actually used ->getline(), but then I reckoned that in $csv->getline(*DATA) couldn't be generalized so easily to the magic filehandle. I didn't want to sacrifice the convenience of not having to explicitely open files; the issue with newlines didn't occur to me, but you're right. The devil is in the details...

Looking at perlop now, it also turns out that <> is actually just a shorthand for <ARGV> (which is just as magic): you can write $csv->getline(*ARGV) and still have everything Just Work™, both piping data into the script and supplying a filename (or several) on the command line.

Thanks for enlightening me, brother!