I'm not sure what that error means -- add use diagnostics for more details if it's a Perl error -- but I doubt the error is where you say it is since the word "Perl" does not appear in that snippet.

By the way, why do you use $x outside the foreach loop and as the variable for the foreach loop? The outer $x is not affected by the foreach, but it's very confusing (and therefore hard to read and to maintain).

my $x = '!';

foreach $x (qw( a b c )) {
   print("$x\n");
}

print("$x\n");
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outputs

a
b
c
!
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