Hi, I see this is an old thread, but still, I would like to share that I have expereciend something similar. I wanted to do a very simple search and replace on a huge ASCII file (around 4GB) using the magic filehandle <>. The thing is that I cannot use seek or whichever method that requires fixed length of records. Also my $/ is set to "\n" and I know that the lines are not incredibly long. Any ideas?

Here is a piece of code:

my $fh = new FileHandle;
@ARGV = ($file);
open $fh, ">test.txt";

while ($line = <>) {
    $line =~ s/$search/$replace/g;
    print $fh $line;
}
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