A slightly modification of your code will avoid memory-problems with big files an rise performance. It's not necessary to put the whole file into an array.

#!/usr/bin/perl

use warnings;
use strict;

open (FOO, "test") ||
    die "ERROR Unable to open test: $!\n";

my $last;
my $first = <FOO>;

while (<FOO>) { $last = $_ }
close FOO;

print "\$first: $first";
print "\$last: $last";
[download]

But in this case i would prefer head and tail if available

head -1 test;tail -1 test
[download]