Can I skip a whole file with the <> operator?

The following Perl code has an obvious inefficiency;

while (<>)
{
if ($ARGV =~ /\d+\.\d+\.\d+/) {next;}
... or do something useful
}

The code will step through every line of the file we don't want.

On the size of files this particular script is running on this is unlikely to make a noticeable difference, but for the sake of learning; How can I junk the whole file <> is working and move to the next one?

The purpose of this is because the sever this script runs on stores old versions of apps with the version number in the file name, I'm only interested in the current version.