I did in-fact look at this method yesterday, and it does seem to be a good way to do this vs binary searching, especially when working with things like log files.

With that said, the File::SortedSeek module seems to be a better fit for what I'm doing it seems, though thanks for your input. As a complete newbie to Perl, it's nice to see I didn't go too far off the mark when looking for a solution to this.