About the file handle thing: in Perl 5 a file handle can be stored as a reference in a scalar variable. As of Perl 5.6 (I think), the builtin open function can initialize this variable for you:

open my $tokenfile, '<', $filename or die "Couldn't open file: $!";
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Now $tokenfile is your filehandle and you don't have to worry about it being global or whatever. Have a read through perlopentut - it talks more about this.