C:\test>dir 1123355.bin 14/04/2015 16:50 16,777,216 1123355.bin C:\test>1159245 1123355.bin Took 12.897612 secs #### C:\test>1159245 1123355.bin Took 3.832763 secs : 3762666 ☺ : 46120 ☻ : 43642 ♥ : 44106 ♦ : 43878 ... #### #! perl -slw use strict; use Time::HiRes qw[ time ]; my $start = time; open I, '<:raw', $ARGV[ 0 ]; my @seen; while( read( I, my $buf, 16384 ) ) { ++$seen[$_] for unpack 'C*', $buf; } printf "Took %f secs\n", time() - $start; printf "%c : %u\n", $_, $seen[$_] for 0 .. 255;