Try wrapping your code in tags.

As Ozymandias said, use strict and -w. Also, if you are going to report an error, you might want to know why the error occurred: use $! to report the error message.

I heard someone say once that you should use all caps to differentiate filehandles from other words in your code.

Why use "|| die" inside the parenthesis? Isn't it just fine outside of them?

You should also error check your 'system' call, but since 'system' returns 0 as the successful response, use && instead of ||.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
# untitled1.pl

use strict;

open(SHORTCUTS,"location.txt") || die"Can't open file: $!";
@file = <SHORTCUTS>;
close(SHORTCUTS) || die "Can't close file: $!";
foreach $line (@file) {
        system($line) && die "Can't execute $line: $!";
}
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J. J. Horner
Linux, Perl, Apache, Stronghold, Unix
jhorner@knoxlug.org http://www.knoxlug.org/