While posting fragments of code is nice, it's even nicer to explain what you're trying to do. From your explanation and your code fragment, it seems that you need not do anything except

open(my $input,"<",$input_file) or die "Could not open $input_file bec
+ause $!\n";
while(<$input>) {
        
     print;
}
[download]

So, what's the point? Is this some way of writing od in Perl?