Note the \$str trick is just to avoid requiring a file external to the sample code.

I tend to open the filehandle directly on a reference to the heredoc to avoid using a variable. You may consider that is going too far :-)

open my $inFH, q{<}, \ << 'EOD' or die qq{open: << heredoc: $!\n};
....
....
EOD
[download]

If the filehandle was to be opened in some inner scope I would use a variable as you have done to avoid the heredoc messing up indentation.

Cheers,

JohnGG