$AlarmFilter seems to be an integer, why are you putting it in <>? take away those brackets and it should work. That syntax is for reading data from a handle or globbing a directory....

Update Rereading your first paragraph, and especially your title, I realize you are trying to get user input... to do so you probably want

my $input = <>;
[download]

or something similar. This will return a line of user input, complete with a newline at the end... but what is the value you are trying to pass in? A default? A prompt?

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