I don't have any ideas about why it's not working at the moment (without the data the script's reading in, it's hard to tell why), but you might try populating @holder with different methods. The first one I'd suggest is not *terribly* idiomatic, but it'll make everything explicit.

my @holder;
open FILE, "tempfile" or die "Couldn't open tempfile:$!\n";
while (defined( $_ = <FILE>)) {
    push @holder, $_;
}
close FILE;
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And run the code as before.

Philosophy can be made out of anything. Or less -- Jerry A. Fodor