Oops. You've just left $/ set to undef for the rest of the program. This can lead to all sorts of nastiness.

Better to do something like this:

my $file_text;

{
  local $/;
  $file_text = <FILE>;
}

print $file_text;
[download]

Which returns $/ to its original value once you leave the bare block.

Update: I should point out that my correction was to the original version of this node. It's now been changed to use my suggestion.

"Perl makes the fun jobs fun
and the boring jobs bearable" - me