paths in Perl

I'm new to writing perl and perl in Mac OS X, although I've had plenty of AppleScript experience. In fact, at one time, a lot of the Apple Support site relied on scripts I wrote to get data from point A to point B via AppleScripts I wrote. 

Anyhow, I'm playing around with reading in some static files in perl, what I've discovered is that if put the script in the same directory as the text file, it works properly. However, if I try to provide a path like: ~/Documents/log_files/

The script can't open the file. is there a trick in Mac OS X to do this that is outside the perl norm? 

Wayne