Question

I want the user to input a file name and have the program output the contents of the file.

I get 2x “Unquoted string may clash with future reserved word” and “Global symbol $filename requires explicit package name.

use strict;
use warnings;
print 'Enter file name: ';
my $fileName = <STDIN>;
chomp($fileName);
open(fh, $filename or die $!);

Also, why is file handle not a variable (actually depending on the example I’ve seen it a variable or not, like what I have here)?

Answer 1

All your problems are right here (and $filename vs. $fileName).

open(fh, $filename or die $!);

You want something more like

open (my $fh, '<', $filename) || die $!;

In the first case, the die condition is on $filename; it’s equivalent to:

if (!$filename) { die $! }

But the second one is more like:

if (!open (my $fh, '<', $filename)) { die $! }

Although doing it this way (with if (!open)) is pointless unless you declare $fh with a more useful scope — right now it’s only visible inside the if block.

The second case implicitly covers the first case, since if $filename is undefined open() will fail with Use of uninitialized value $filename in open.