In perl's spirit of DWIM (Do What I Mean) and its design for doing what comes naturally, your function (recopied below) may now *return* anything while returning a lot of useful information:

printFile($file) or warn "Could not printFile, '$file': $!";

sub printFile {
  my ($file) = @_;
  open FH, "<$file" or return;
  print while (<FH>);
  close FH; # do not complain if it cannot
}
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Thanks to the design you will get a meaningful (undef) return if either the open or close fail. Aah, I love this language It does what you want it to do even when you don't think you told it to do anything. It's like perl can read my mind.
$will->code for @food or $$;