In the second block, you never localize *FILE, which is a dubious practice anyway now that we can use this form:

open my $file, "<", $file or die "crap: $!";
my $raw = do { local $/; <$file> }; # sexy
close $file;
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Personally, my favorite slurping method these days is slurp() from File::Slurp. It's up to version 9_999.x, so you know it's good.