in reply to Re^2: Passing user input to a shell command
in thread Passing user input to a shell command

I open it to insure that user is typing the file exists

Opening it is not the best way to do that. There are the file test operators, such as -f: 

-f $file or die "You specified a non-existent file.\n";

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Even if you do open it for this purpose, you should definitely close it right away, before letting another process have it.

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