The problem with
while (my $line = <HANDLE>) {...}
is that it stops the loop prematurely if $line is false, but defined. There are only two string values that are defined, but false: the empty string, and the string containing the character 0, and nothing else. The first cannot happen - even an "empty line" ends with a newline. The latter can happen in two situations: for a file ending in "$/0", that is, the last line contains 0, and does not end with the line terminator. But regular text files always do (otherwise, they aren't proper text files anyway). The second case is if you read in the file character by character, by setting $/ = \1;, and the file contains a 0.
If you have opened the file using a PerlIO filter, anything can happen (or if you have tied the file handle). But then, an undefined value may be returned as well, even if the file hasn't completely read.
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