If you're going to tell him to use 3-arg open, you might as well recommend lexical file handles and a better error message too.

And I find it's usually better to check what you got rather than checking what you will get.

my $frame_qfn = 'temp';
open(my $frame_fh, '<', $frame_qfn)
   or die("Unable to open frame file $frame_qfn: $!\n");

while (<$frame_fh>) {
   print;
}

if (!$.) {
    print "$frame_fh contains no data\n";
}
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