Since you told me in the Chatterbox that you have huge amounts of email-addresses, I'd suggest you use some kind of database. DBI could be used to save your data to a "real" database. If this is overkill, you might as well use a flatfile database, AnyDBM_File for example. As suggested above: You can use a hash as well, but then you might run out of memory..

Regards,
-octo

Great idea .. and you could even do something clever and separate the address at the '@' if you've seen that domain before and make the database store
• domain -> foo.com
• user -> james.barr:mark.bazz
It all depends on how much RAM you have, how much DB space, and so forth.

--t. alex

"Mud, mud, glorious mud. Nothing quite like it for cooling the blood!"
--Michael Flanders and Donald Swann

Update: It's debatable if "using a database is an overkill". The data file is 300M daily, which is getting large. You could use a temporary database table and have MySQL worry about optimization and memory management rather than rely on one of the DBD modules.

I think using a database is an overkill, why not simply use a hash tied to a DB file?
It's much easier than installing a Database and DBI modules to suit.
It'll most likely faster due to the simple nature of the datastructure.

--

Brother Frankus.

¤

If that's not what you are doing (hard to tell from this fragment), please explain.

--t. alex

"Mud, mud, glorious mud. Nothing quite like it for cooling the blood!"
--Michael Flanders and Donald Swann

#!/usr/bin/perl
use Email::Find;

my %seen_emails;  # this could get big!
$file = shift;
open (FILE, $file) or die "Couldn't open filename: ";
while (<FILE>)
{
 $text = $_;

 my $finder = Email::Find->new(sub 
 {
     my($email, $orig_email) = @_;
     my $formatted_email = $email->format;
     if (!defined($seen_emails{$formatted_email})) {
          # remember we've seen this guy
          $seen_emails{$formatted_email} = 1;
          
          # and show this email addy
          print $formatted_email . "\n";
     }
     return $orig_email;
 });

 $finder->find(\$text);