in reply to Processing slurped file.

Slurping, splitting on \n, then adding in the \n is the exact same as:
my @records = <BIGFILE>;
Why not just do that? In fact, you could do something like:
my $searchstring = 'LONDON'; my @records = grep /$searchstring/, <BIGFILE>;
Voila! Just the string you want in @records, all postpended with \n. :)

------
We are the carpenters and bricklayers of the Information Age.

Don't go borrowing trouble. For programmers, this means Worry only about what you need to implement.