Thank you all-- ikegami, rvosa, sgifford, cdarke, starbolin, graff, GrandFather, and eff_i_g -- for your great comments on this. 
open(my $fh, '<', $filename)
   or die("Unable to open ...: $!\n");

while (<$fh>) {
   chomp;
   ...
}

[download]
... did the trick.

In reply to Re^2: `cat $myfile`; vs. open(MYHANDLE, "myfile") by bw
in thread `cat $myfile`; vs. open(MYHANDLE, "myfile") by bw

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