An important detail on your die checks for your open statements.

As pointed out in perlstyle, a useful error message should pass through any information about why you had an error, and should include enough information that if you have to debug the problem, you will have information on where to start. In your case the easiest way to do that is to include $! in your error message and remove the newline.

I consider this change extremely important, for reasons that would be apparent to you if you had ever been at work trying to get someone else's process back up running so it can finish a critical job...