The nice thing about Perl is that it very often does what you want without you having to jump through hoops. If you supply a file name (or multiple file names) as an argument, Perl will automatically open the file for you so you can read it using an empty <> (readline) function. The following steps create a simple CSV file and an equally simple script to read it.

$ cat > xxx.csv
Fred,male,25
Beth,female,31
Joe,male,22
$ cat > xxx
#!/usr/bin/perl
#
use strict;
use warnings;

while ( <> ) # Read the file supplied as argument
{
    chomp; # Remove line terminator
    my( $name, $sex, $age ) = split m{,};
    printf qq{Name: %s\n Sex: %s\n Age: %s\n-----\n},
       $name, $sex, $age;
}
$ chmod +x xxx
$ ./xxx xxx.csv 
Name: Fred
 Sex: male
 Age: 25
-----
Name: Beth
 Sex: female
 Age: 31
-----
Name: Joe
 Sex: male
 Age: 22
-----
$
[download]

I hope this is helpful.