Actually you don't have to use the \\ escaped backslashes. See this tutorial node by tachyon and commentary by various other people.

As a quick test you can paste the code below into a file on your local system and run it w/o error

use strict ;
use warnings;
use diagnostics ; # explain the warnings


open(FH,">C:/tmp.txt") || die "blah blah $!";
print FH "some text\n";
close(FH);
open(FH, "<C:/tmp.txt");
my $test=<FH>;
print $test;
[download]

--mandog