The problem is not in the open, but in the way you loop through the file.

You must not have blanks between the filehandle and the angle-operator (because then the angle-operator sees the blanks, finds that this is not a filehandle and tries to glob it.

You first attempt shoud be ok as long as you do it like this: 

while ( <IN> ){ # no blanks araound IN
  ...
while ( <$fh> ){  # dito

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And while we are at it the second form (using a lexical variable rather than a package-filehandle) is considered to be better style and you should also use the 3-arg form of open: 
open (IN, "<",  $dir/$file")

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In reply to Re: reading files from a directory by morgon
in thread reading files from a directory by kevyt

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