Error in escape sequence '\ t'

This script is from the book "VRML for the Internet" ( VRML: Browsing and Building Cyberspace ) by Mark Pesce, 1995. Although I have it, the cd-rom that included it will be in the garbage years ago ...

Its author is James Waldrop, and calls it "Datafat munger", a redundant precision eliminator, which just removes a few decimals, but a vrml file has hundreds. A compactor, so to speak, creating a new file with extension .new.

I have transcribed as it is printed and looked at a copy in English in case it was an erratum, and the codes are identical. IT DOES NOT WORK, and I remember that when I was young it was executed (the one of the CD-ROM).

I get syntax error by the \t modifier on line 23.

Where is the error?

for ($x=-1; $x++ < $#ARGV; ) {
    $file = $ARGV[$x];
    if (! (-e $file) ) {
        print "$file not found, skipping...\n";
        next;
    }
    &convert($file);
}
exit;

sub convert {
    local ($file)= @_;
    open  (OLD, $file) || die "Couldn´t open $file: $!\n";
    open  (NEW, ">$file.new") || die "Couldn´t open $file.new: $!\n";
    while (<OLD>) {
        $line = $_;
        if (/Normal/) { while (<OLD>) { last if /}/; } Sline => ""; }
        if (/normalIndex/) { while(<OLD>) { last if /[]]/; } $line = ""; }
        $line  =~  s/[-+]?[0-9]\.[0-9]+e[+-][0-9]+/0/g;
        $line  =~  s/([-+]?[0-9]+\.[0-9]{2})[0-9]+/$1/g;
        $line =~ s
for ($x=-1; $x++ < $#ARGV; ) {
    $file = $ARGV[$x];
    if (! (-e $file) ) {
        print "$file not found, skipping...\n";
        next;
    }
    &convert($file);
}
exit;

sub convert {
    local ($file)= @_;
    open  (OLD, $file) || die "Couldn´t open $file: $!\n";
    open  (NEW, ">$file.new") || die "Couldn´t open $file.new: $!\n";
    while (<OLD>) {
        $line = $_;
        if (/Normal/) { while (<OLD>) { last if /}/; } Sline => ""; }
        if (/normalIndex/) { while(<OLD>) { last if /[]]/; } $line = ""; }
        $line  =~  s/[-+]?[0-9]\.[0-9]+e[+-][0-9]+/0/g;
        $line  =~  s/([-+]?[0-9]+\.[0-9]{2})[0-9]+/$1/g;
        $line =~ s%pre%\.00/0/g;
        $line =~ s/[ ]+/ /g;
        $line =~ s/[\t]+/ /g;
        $line =~ s/^ //g;
        print NEW $line;
    }
    close OLD;
    close NEW;
}
\.00/0/g;
        $line =~ s/[ ]+/ /g;
        $line =~ s/[\t]+/ /g;
        $line =~ s/^ //g;
        print NEW $line;
    }
    close OLD;
    close NEW;
}

Thank you if you can help me.