I find it much safer to rely on object wrappers provided by perl (all the IO:: modules). You never have to deal with GLOBs or doing a local *FILE within a subroutine or anything. Just do:

sub slurp {
    my $file = IO::File->new("params.inc","<") or die $!;
    restore_parameters($file);
    $file->close();
}
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I haven't actually used the restore_parameters call you're referring to but I'm guessing from the documentation that it would work just fine...