exiting via next: Extra careful or just bitchy?

[vacant]

Dear monks:

I have the following pretty simple subroutine which finds and returns the next non-empty, non-comment line in an input text file. Comments are lines beginning with "#". dprint() is a printing sub for debugging.

sub nextline {
  my $fh = shift;
  my $l;

  do {
    $l = <$fh>;
    if (!defined($l)) { dprint "end of file\n"; return undef }
    dprint "line is: $l";
    next if ($l =~ /^#/);  # skip comments
    $l = clean($l);
  } until ($l ne '');  # skip blank lines

  return $l;
} ## end sub nextline

This code works perfectly, but for every comment in the input file, Perl complains (even without strict):

Exiting subroutine via next...

What kind of trouble can doing it this way cause, or why is Perl complaining?

Thanks kindly,
Vacant