Do you know what setting $/ does? If set to a reference to an integer, it reads in that many bytes (and in your case one or more of those bytes contains a newline). It does not merely set the "maximum" number of bytes read. Is that what you wanted (this would be appropriate for a fixed length format)? Or are you trying to read in the file one "line" at a time? What does one line of the file look like? Does one line contain one file name? Or more?