Update So apparently I was missing the fact that require also deals with filenames... /me goes rtfm'ing

I believe thought the argument to require must be a bare word... For example,

    require "FileHandle";
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Fails. Whereas if you eval a string like so...

    my $require_filehandle = "require FileHandle";
    eval $require_filehandle;
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This should work. That's because in the context of eval, require is getting a bareword "FileHandle", not a scalar value with the string "FileHandle" as its content