Even better with the open is to use the three parameter variant and lexical file handles:

open my $inFile, '<', $sloc or die "Can't open $loc: $!\n";
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which makes the open mode explicit (and avoids a potential injection attack), and gives all the strictly goodness advantages from using the lexical file handle.

Oh, and don't interpolate a single variable ("$loc") - there is no need and clutters the code.