Seek isn't really for skipping forwards into unknown territory like this unless you know enough about the file format to be able to know exactly where you want to go to. In particular, you can't do a "skip the next 100 files" command.

However, if you do a

push(@tells, $dir->tell());
[download]

at the start of each page, it will allow you to use seek later to skip back to any of those particular points later using the values stored in the @tells array. E.G.

# have now read through all files once and stored every
# Nth position in @tells
my $dirpos = @tells / 2; # start in the middle
my $browsing = 1;
while ($browsing)
{
   my $action = "";
   $f = $dir->seek($tells[$dirpos]); 
   # code to go here to read next N files and display
   # results to user.
   # Come back here when we have an submit from the user
   # and $action set to the result.
   if ($action eq "pageforwards")
   {
      #should check for end
      $dirpos++;
   }
   elsif ($action eq "pagebackwards")
   {
      #should check for start
      $dirpos--;
   }
   else
   {
      # do other actions
      $browsing = 0;
   }
}
[download]

This way, you only have to store a value for every Nth file, which is a big reduction in storage.

--
Brovnik.

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