Actually putting the program name in a variable is an excellent step for several reasons:

• It's no longer a hard-coded constant
• It can be reused (for example in the error message when the open call fails)
• this also prevents "constant drift" where you'd have to remember to change it in both the parameter to open as well as your error message

Especially if the location is likely to vary from machine-to-machine (or user-to-user) you might want to go even a step further by defining the default location as a constant (or Readonly value if you like) and initializing the path using that constant but allowing it to be overridden via Getopt::Long option or the environment.

Yeah the rest of the OP's code has problems, but this complaint's specious.

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