use strict;
use warnings;

my $lastFound = -1; # No match value
$| = 1;

/\ba\b/ and ($lastFound = tell DATA) while <DATA>;

print "No match \n" and exit if $lastFound == -1;

seek DATA, $lastFound, 0;
print <DATA>;

__DATA__
Hi, I've seen a few similar problems to this posted here recently but none of
them cover what I need to do and my Perl isn't strong enough yet for me to
figure out how to do this. I'm parsing a number of text files (can range in size
from 1K upto 100M) where the record size of each line is variable. I need to
find (or seek to ?) the last occurence of a pattern then apply some further
parsing logic from that point on until the end of file. What I do now (which
doesn't cope with the problem) is: