Since you're treating all of the files as individual strings, you can do the undef $/; business.

I don't think so, you want to read the filenames stored in 'files.txt' line by line - which your solution doesn't do. So I'd go for something like this:

open(FH, 'filename') or die $!;
my $text = do {local $/; <FH>};
close FH;
[download]

For a complete treatmeant of many possibilities and discussions on how to slurp a file read the very informative Slurp a file.

-- Hofmator