Works for me - maybe the problem is that you didn't show us where line 63 is in your code?

I used the following code and it runs without problems:

use strict;
sub RLS_ropen($) {
    (@_ == 1) || die "RLS_ropen called w/ invalid argument list: ".sca
+lar(@_)." params instead of 1";
    my $name = $_[0];

    unless ( $name ) {
        # invalid - null or empty file name
        return "";
    }

    unless ( -e $name && -r $name ) {
        # file doesn't exits or is unreadable
        return "";
    }

    open( my $dbh, "< $name");
    return $dbh;
}   # end RLS_ropen

my $fh = RLS_ropen "test.tmp";
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... but maybe you want to be more explicit about things going bad, like for example, the file not existing:

    open( my $dbh, "< $name")
        or die "Couldn't open database file '$name': $!";
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