The correct way to read a data file into an array

Just reading the file into an array, one line per element, is trivial:

open my $handle, '<', $path_to_file;
chomp(my @lines = <$handle>);
close $handle;

Now the lines of the file are in the array @lines.

If you want to make sure there is error handling for open and close, do something like this (in the snipped below, we open the file in UTF-8 mode, too):

my $handle;
unless (open $handle, "<:encoding(utf8)", $path_to_file) {
   print STDERR "Could not open file '$path_to_file': $!\n";
   # we return 'undefined', we could also 'die' or 'croak'
   return undef
}
chomp(my @lines = <$handle>);
unless (close $handle) {
   # what does it mean if close yields an error and you are just reading?
   print STDERR "Don't care error while closing '$path_to_file': $!\n";
}