With your 2-arg using <>, how do you plan to deal with the guy in marketting when he's named something cute like "<< EXTRA!! >>"?. It's a filename so it should be maximally useful to the human using it. Probably a non-geek. The name supports having useful punctuation in it. It'd be nice if perl didn't croak when it tried to read the contents of that file.

[Added: See what sucks is this "croak or nasal-demons on bad filenames" is that the calling program can be 100% sane and not have the shell invoked at all. perhaps just an execvp. This FUBARs all perl programs using the -p and -n switches too. *grumpy*!!]