On a WinNT system here, I had good luck with the following:

perl -w

use strict;

local *INPUT;
open (INPUT, 'catalog.$test') || die "Error: $!\n";
print while (<INPUT>);
close INPUT || die "Worse Error:  $!\n";
[download]

Remember, there is no variable interpolation in single-quoted strings. (Strange, though, that "catalog.\$test" didn't work for you. Try using -w and strict.)