“Editing is a rewording activity.“ (Alan Perlis)

You really should finally write it like this:

open my $fh, '<', $file or die "$file: $!";

Or even more compact:

use autodie;

open my $fh, '<', $file;
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See autodie.

You can choose the name of the filehandle as you like, e.g. like this:

open my $gizmo, '<', $file;

Or whatever. It doesn't really matter.

Look again here.