Well, if I had a 1000 line file and I always only wanted the second line, I would put the data from the second line elsewhere. But, personally, I think what you have there is quite ugly. I would use something more like the following to get the second line:

my $line = (map scalar (<FH>),0..1)[1];
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If you use scalar() in there the filehandle will not be used in list context, therefor not being read in all at once.

Cheers,
KM