As a possible (ugly) workaround, you can resort to the shell or other tools to perform the tests and file reading you need done:

perl -le 'print system(qw( test -e fileThatDoesNotExist ))'
256
perl -le 'print system(qw( test -e .profile ))'
0
[download]

... and for reading from a file (seek()ing is not supported) :

open my $fh, qq(cat "$file" |)
    or die "Couldn't read '$file': $!";
[download]

Of course, you will like to move to a proper perl as soon as possible, but this might be a stopgap measure.