This sounds like a loaded question - why are you asking? Did you run into a problem with the code above? Are you wondering if there is more error trapping you can do to detect a read problem?

The code you gave is exactly the code I would use to open and read/process all the records in a file. Except I would put a message in my die - something like this:

   my $abs_filename = "x:\\myfiles\file.txt";
   open(RESTART, "<$abs_filename")
       or die "Can't open $abs_filename: $!"; 
   while (<RESTART>) {
       # do something with $_
   }
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