Thanks again. Obviously, writing all of the data (often exceedding 25 GB) to an old-fashioned hard disk represents the bottleneck for this application. I knew what my loops did (satisfies legibility and future maintenance), and from my past (though relatively limited) Perl experience knew that they represented a reasonably efficient method of accomplishing this task, too. I never even would have asked about this topic if someone (a 14-year-old, no less) didn't complain about my methods. :) That said, I do want to avoid learning poor techniques, and didn't know that Perl could do string incrementing, so I have gained a fair amount of knowledge from this thread.