You don't need to open the DATA handle.

Well, more to the point the filehandle DATA is special to perl (reading from it will give you what comes after the __END__ token in your source). It doesn't look like that's what you're doing so you might be better served (more to the point, the person who comes in down the road and tries to make sense of your code might be better served) using a different name for this handle (e.g. INFILE or DATAFILE).