"I've looked at open and..."

"Please tell newbies to die to always include the $! at the end. If I had $! at the end of my die message, it would have cut at least 15 minutes of me traversing directories thinking the file did not exist."

Not sure how you missed this, it's in the open documentation, all the examples and you have been told about using this before (e.g. Creating a random generator). Also, consider avoiding File::Slurp due to issues.