Use a module for common tasks. Someone has already written and optimized the code, figured out the edge cases, fixes bug reports ...

Path::Tiny is my go-to tool for file handling. To read in lines into an array, use lines(). Chomp if you want, handle encoding if you want.

1193233.txt

Washington
New York
Louisiana
Georgia
Texas
Iowa
[download]

1193233.pl

use strict; use warnings; use feature 'say';
use Path::Tiny; # imports path()

my $file = '1193233.txt';
my @list = path( $file )->lines({ chomp => 1 });

say scalar @list . ' items';
say 'item: ' . $_ for @list;
[download]

Output:

$ perl 1193233.pl
6 items
item: Washington
item: New York
item: Louisiana
item: Georgia
item: Texas
item: Iowa
[download]

Hope this helps!