G'day haukex,

I have no issue with that idiom, per se. I use it myself in production code and don't recall ever having had any problems with it.

It's included in chromatic's Modern Perl book: see the "Perl Beyond Syntax - Idioms - Easy File Slurping" section. That also makes reference to the issue raised by ++BrowserUk.

I also concur with what a number of other monks said about improving the error message.