The CGI documentation should help you out perfectly.

Read it carefully and mind everything it says like:

1. Make sure that your form has the correct enctype e.g enctype='multipart/form-data'
2. The filename (aka $q->param("file") ) acts as both a scalar ( the filename on the client filesystem ) and a file handle ( to the temporary file on the web server)

This second part seems to be the part you are missing

When I had to do file upload for the first time a few weeks ago it worked perfectly.

#$data_from _file = get_file_data( $q->upload('file') );
sub get_file_data {
    my $filehandle = shift;
    my    ($data, $buffer, $bytesread);
    while ($bytesread=read($filehandle,$buffer,1024)) {
           $data .= $buffer;
        }
    return $data;
}
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--
Clayton