Perl did some old tricks that reached a little bit too far inside the <stdio.h> macros to be completely portable but that allowed Perl line-at-a-time I/O to be about twice as fast as C line-at-a-time I/O... on sufficiently "standard enough" systems. That was back in the days of AT&T Unix, before Linux. Last time I checked (long enough ago that I hope things have improved but not long enough ago that I've heard that they have), Perl still did line-at-a-time I/O unnecessarilly inefficiently when compiled on a system that isn't "standard enough" (which is nearly every system these days).

This meant that Perl line-at-a-time I/O was 4 times slower than it really should be on Linux (for example). This actually made re-implementing line-at-a-time I/O in Perl code faster than using Perl's own line-at-a-time I/O implemented in C code (about twice as fast, which means that when Perl gets fixed, it would be about twice as slow, which would be expected).

Yes, it makes little sense for Perl code to be faster than Perl's own C code. Unfortunately, that was certainly the case not too long ago.

The command perl -V:d_stdstdio will tell you whether Perl thinks your platform is "standard enough".

But, yes, the speed difference between line-at-a-time I/O and "slurping" is usually small enough not to matter (even considering Perl's quirk here). The memory consumption difference can be hugely significant, of course.

use strict;
use warnings;
my $logfile="log.txt";
my $error="DOWN";
my $warn="PROBLEM";
my $redbutton="\<img src\=\'default_files/perlredblink\.gif'>";
my $greenbutton="\<img src\=\'default_files/perlgreenblink\.gif'>";
my $yellowbutton="\<img src\=\'default_files/perlyellowblink\.gif'>";
open LOG, $logfile or die "Cannot open $logfile for read :$!";
my $button = $greenbutton;
my @logfile=<LOG>;    # throw logfile into an array
while (<LOG>) {
if ($_ =~ /$error/i) {
  $button = $redbutton;
    print "<!--Content-type: text/html-->\n\n";
     print "$button";
     last;
  }
elsif ($_ =~ /$warn/i) {
  $button = $yellowbutton;
    print "<!--Content-type: text/html-->\n\n";
     print "$button";
     last;
  }
else {
    print "<!--Content-type: text/html-->\n\n";
    print "$button";
    last;
  }
}
close LOG;
[download]

First and foremost, your line:

my @logfile=<LOG>;    # throw logfile into an array

does exactly what the comment says: it reads the whole logfile into an array (which you subsequently never use). That means that the test in the following line:

while ( <LOG> ) {

can never be true: the filehandle has already reached the end of the file by the time this line is reached. Just get rid of the first of these two lines.

However, once this problem is fixed, it becomes clear that your program logic is flawed. The program will only ever read just one line from the logfile, because all the branches of the if/elsif/else structure end with last. So if the first line of the logfile contains, say, just "foo", it will print a green button and stop executing, even if the second (or third...) line is "SERVER DOWN".

Lastly, as your regexes stand, $error will match eg "Downing Street", which is probably not what you want.

I suggest that you use something like the following (simplified for the purposes of this posting to read from __DATA__ rather from a filehandle, and to output a simple string):

use strict;
use warnings;

my $error = 'DOWN';
my $warn = 'PROBLEM';

my $redbutton = 'RED BUTTON';
my $greenbutton = 'GREEN BUTTON';
my $yellowbutton = 'YELLOW BUTTON';

my $button = $greenbutton;

while ( <DATA> ) {
  if ( /\b$error\b/i ) {
    $button = $redbutton;
    last;
  }
  elsif ( /\b$warn\b/i ) {
    $button = $yellowbutton;
  }
}
print $button;

__DATA__
foo
tony.blair@downingstreet.gov.uk
Watership Down
bar
[download]

OK, in light if this discussion, I have a similar problem.
I need help, I have a script that i am trying to do the following:
file1= list of unique ID numbers
file2= list of unique html code with the unique ID numbers within the code per line(about 16k-bytes each seperated by carage.
Both are standard text files.
===========
#!/usr/bin/perl
#read each line in test1.txt into data_file array
$data_file="test1.txt";
open(DATA, $data_file) || die("Could not open file!");
@data_file=<DATA>;

#read each line in code.txt into a names_file array
$names_file="code.txt"
open(NAMES, $names_file) || die("Could not open file!");
@names_data=<NAMES>;

#create loop that reads each ID in code.txt (NAMES array), searches for each in array elements for #test1.txt (DATA array), redirects a new (NAMES).html for each element
foreach ( $NAMES )
{
chomp($NAMES);
($NAMES=$DATA<0> > +("$NAMES<0>.html"));
}

close NAMES;
close DATA;

I am new to perl but this is absolutely riddled with errors and I have written this according to examples of similar scripts.