The problem is that the apostrophe is special to the shell, and your quick way of reading the content of a file uses the shell.

If you don't have any double quotes in your filenames, a quick way to do what you want is:

@ModPageFile = `cat "$pagefile"`;
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this will "escape" the single quotes. Of course, if you have double quotes, it breaks down again.

Alternatively, avoid the shell. Another quick way of slurping in the content of a file is:

@ModPageFile = do {local @ARGV = $pagefile; <>};
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Or you could use a module like Perl6::Slurp. Or just open the file yourself, checking for errors and reading in the content:

open my $fh, "<", $pagefile or die "open $pagefile: $!";
@ModPageFile = <$fh>;
close $fh or die "close $pagefile: $!";
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