Example
Using the idiom from The Manual Way several times in a script soon gets tedious so you might want to try a module.
use Path::Tiny;
my $contents = path($filename)->slurp;
You can pass a binmode option if you need control over file encodings, line endings etc. - see man perlio:
my $contents = path($filename)->slurp( {binmode => ":encoding(UTF-8)"} );
Path::Tiny also has a lot of other functions for dealing with files so it may be a good choice.
