There should be a CPAN module to do the "read a block and buffer" method transparently (especially since we have tied filehandles), but can't seem to find one. The I'm gonna poke around CPAN a bit more and see if I can find one. If I can't find one on CPAN and no one here objects I'll probably build a module to do that (giving credit to Perlmonks.org and the monks who contributed to this discussion).