Well here if I change the filename to one that I know works, it executes just fine. It even does what you think it should do. So there is no obvious reason for your lack of output.

But looking at it, I hope you clean it up. You don't bother to do an error check on your open. You don't test $@ after your eval. You manipulate $/ and leave it hosed afterwards (just localize it).

In short, if I was working with you, I would tell you to start rewriting from scratch with error checks. I strongly suspect that your above problem is going to turn out to be some, "D'oh, I was doing something silly so I didn't really have the problem that I thought I did!" kind of issue. But the lack of sanity checks is going to come back and bite you hard.