Personally, I prefer to just open a filehandle:

use IO::File;
my %files;
foreach my $name (@ARGV) {
    my $file = IO::File->new($name) or next; # print error message her
+e, etc.
    my @lines = <$file>;
    $files{$name} = \@lines;
    $file->close;
}
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Jeff

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