Thanks for the responses, and special thanks to tilly for the code! So while I play with tilly's code, another sort of followup question: It seems that everyone thinks that my script is biting off more than it can chew (or chomp) so to speak. What if instead of using

$text=<INFILE>;
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I used a while loop of the Text::Balanced module or tilly's code to bite off balanced brace chunks and run them through the rest of the code one at a time? This would seem to me to have the memory advantages of the

while ($line_in_file = <INFILE>)
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line while more suited to my needs. Does that thinking make sense? A lot of little processes instead of one big one? This is extremely helpful advice, thanks again guys!