Works fine for me (once the missing trailing braces were added).

Just for fun, we'll refactor it into more idiomatic perl...

• Add use strict and warnings :-)
• Split uses $_ by default, so don't need to state it.
• Since we're not looking at the end of the line we don't need the chomp at all... so we remove it...
• We don't need the close - the filehandle will automatically be closed when it falls out of scope.
• Rename $id to $id_to_fetch since it's more descriptive.
• Since we're only interested in the school and name we can just extract those from the split. Note we drop 'school' from the name since it's redundant.
• We can then simplify the name return to 'return $name if $id eq $fetch_id;'

This gives us...

use strict;
use warnings;

sub get_schoolname {
    my $id_to_fetch = $_[0];
    local *SCHOOLDATA;
    open(SCHOOLDATA,"school_data.pdt") or die "Can't open school data 
+file: $!";
    while ( <SCHOOLDATA> ) {
        my ($id, $name) = split /\|/;
        return $name if $id eq $id_to_fetch;
    };
};
[download]

---

update: localised SCHOOLDATA so that that darn filehandle is actually closed. Thanks to sauoq and tachyon for pointing out my error.

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