If you are looking to get the contents of the file into a simple string (a 'scalar') variable, you have a number of option.

Roll your own.

You can read a file into an array in one go, which terminates on End-Of_file:

my $file = 'foo.bar';
open(FH, $file);       # as you already have
my @temp = <FH>;       # pull all lines into a list
close FH;              # because we are good people
my ($name1, $name2, $address, $phone) = split("\t", @temp[0]);
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Option 2: File::Slurp

For most of my code, I use File::Slurp these days:

use File::Slurp;

my $file = 'foo.bar';
my $temp = read_file($file);
my ($name1, $name2, $address, $phone) = split("\t", $temp);
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(and you do realise that your split should really be using '/' for the regexp, not quotes? It's working because perl will accept any non-alphanumeric as a regexp delimiter is certain cases. Clever Perl :) )