open(FILE, " ") question

[Eric Preece]

Hi,

I am very new to perl. I am writing a script that is supposed to open an html file and 
do some various tasks then later on it should print out the html file. I am having 
problems with one portion of it. I distilled it down to this code snippet

==========================================
# test
use strict;

my $file;
my $HTML;

sub testOpen {
        local (*FILE);          # filehandle
        $file = $_[0] || die ("No file specified\n");
        open(FILE, "$file") || die("File could not be opened - $file\n");
                while (<FILE>) {
                        $HTML .= $_;
                }
        close(FILE);
        $HTML =~ s/\$(\w+)/${$1}/g;     
        return $HTML;   
}

print "Content-type: text/html\n\n";
print &testOpen("test.htm");            # Prints the contents of this file

============================================

My problem is this works great from the command prompt. But will not open the file if 
hit the script from a browser. I am not sure why it behaves differently in a browser - 
I suspect permissions but I have the directory set to write, execute.

I am using a win2k IIS box with the lastest version of ActivePerl.

Thanks in advance,

Eric