So you're trying to pass the contents of the file as an argument to your program? That's not going to work unless the contents of the file are small and suitable to be passed on the command line. Otherwise, consider using pipes (see perlipc) and sending the data to the other program some other way. Like I said above, this works for me:

@array = ("file1", "file2");
@output = `cat @array`;
# @output now has the output of that command
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Either you did not explain your problem correctly, something is not as you say it is (check assumptions), or something is screwey with your particular system.

Either way, if @array had a large amount of data in it, I would still not expect the error message you received. Be sure you're using strict and running Perl with the -w flag turned on (or 'use warnings' in 5.6). This might point you in the direction of the problem.