Grab Current Line of SVG File

[beginAgain]

Hello, I have been tasked with "correcting" certain items in SVG files. I have never used Perl and after a crash course (using PerlMonks, Stack Overflow, etc.) I can successfully read the SVG file line by line and correct the necessary lines. My final problem, and this is admittedly because of my inexperience, I cannot figure out how to grab the current line so I can do a smartmatch (or something similar). All I need to do is make sure that the current line starts with "<path" and process that line if so. Below is the (partial) code where I read in the file and loop through the lines to make the corrections. EDIT - Ihave added more of the code to show what I want to do with smartmatch - NOTE thta target is set like so:
my $target = '<path';

 
opendir IN, $dirname;
my @in = grep { /^[^.]/ } readdir IN;
closedir IN;

for my $in (@in) {
  open IN, '<', "$dirname/$in" || next;
  open OUT, '>', "$outdirname/$in" || die "can't open file output/$in"
+;
  foreach(<IN>) { #read file line by line
  
    # Strings to correct Note: Escaped ( with \
    s/rotate\(-180/rotate\(-0/g;
    # Look at the current line
    my @look_in = <IN>;
    # <path is in this line, process line
    if( $target ~~ @look_in) {
        for my $key (keys %stroke_width_hash) {
            s/$key/$stroke_width_hash{$key}/g;
        }
    }
    
    
    # Print out line to OUT file
    print OUT $_;
  }
  close OUT;
  close IN;
}

I have tried (sad attempts):
Print (<IN>)
Print IN
etc.
But none of these are grabbing the actual text for that line
Any help will be greatly appreciated...
Charles