Re: Parsing Multiple Lines.

[NetWallah]

You have declared the filehandle used in "open" (my $fh) - That makes $fh a Symbolic reference to the file handle, and I don't believe you are trying to do that - more likely, this is a result of misunderstanding the statement in the doc:
If FILEHANDLE is an undefined lexical (my) variable the variable is assigned a reference to a new anonymous filehandle....

Juse use an UNDEFINED name like FH (No dollar), and you'll be OK.
Update: OK - seems like I need to re-read the docs myself. See notes below.

[Zaxo]

Bzzzt. Not a symref.

$ perl -e'my $fh;open($fh, "< foo") or die $!; print "$fh"'
GLOB(0x804b3f8)$

Nothing wrong with OP's lexical filehandle. It is good practice to localize a global handle such as you recommend within some scope. Then you don't need to worry about name uniqueness.

[Somni]

Er, no, open(my $fh, "...") is correct usage. $fh is autovivified into an actual filehandle (not just a symbolic reference). It is the preferred method for opening a filehandle without clobbering an existing one. The excerpt you are referring to does mean an undefined scalar variable ($fh), not a bareword (FH).

perldoc perlopentut provides several examples of this in the Indirect Filehandles section.