Well...

open_file is not really just opening the file, it is grabbing the contents of the file; You might want to make the name of the sub match the action of the sub more closely.

I would not declare the my @contents outside the sub and then rely on the side effect of the sub altering the data in contents. Instead I would pass the @contents into the sub by reference, and have it filled that way. This avoids creating two different arrays and copying them around via pass-by-value.
Side effects can be confusing when code gets reused later. For instance this code snippet is only useful if you want to fill a previously existing array named contents -- not very modular.

It also might be useful for the calling routine to be able to tell if an error occurred during the "grabbing"; Passing back an error code would allow the caller to gracefully recover from any possible error. I believe it is better to allow the caller to recover from the error rather than the "grabber" because any number of callers may want to react in a different way, so returning the code allows that -- reacting with the die inside the "grabber" does not. Returning a '0' can signify no error occured.

my @contents;

my $error = grabFile('myfile.txt', \@contents);

sub grabFile {
   open(FILE, $_[0]) || return ($!);
   @{$_[1]} = <FILE>;
   close(FILE);
   return 0;
}
[download]

And this is not OOP.... OOP is much more than this.

---

---

Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!

Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.

Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.

Please read these before you post! —

• How do I compose an effective node title?
• How do I post a question effectively?
• Markup in the Monastery

Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:

a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr

You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)

	For:		Use:
	&		&
	<		&lt;
	>		&gt;
	[		&#91;
	]		&#93;

Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?

See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.