Beginner?! Welcome!

Here are some tips to read files:

open (FILEHANDLE,"file.txt") ;
@data = <FILEHANDLE> ;
close (FILEHANDLE) ;
chomp(@data); ## this will cut off the \n or \r
              ## in the end of each line.
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This will read all the file too, but is a better way for big files:

open (FILEHANDLE,"file.txt") ;
my $data ;
1 while( read(FILEHANDLE, $data , 1024*8 , length($data) ) ) ;
close (FILEHANDLE) ;
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This will read line by line:

open (FILEHANDLE,"file.txt") ;
while ($line = <FILEHANDLE>) { ... }
close (FILEHANDLE) ;
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If you are trying to open binary files, use binmode() after open:

open (FILEHANDLE,"file.txt") ;
binmode(FILEHANDLE) ;
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In your code you tell that don't want to do $line = $line . $_ ;
This is not a good thing, because you rewrite all the variable for each loop, and is more slow. Do that:

$line .= $_
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You will find the same thing for:

$var += 10 ; # $var = $var + 10 ;
$var -= 10 ; # $var = $var - 10 ;
$var *= 10 ; # $var = $var * 10 ;
$var /= 10 ; # $var = $var / 10 ;
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See the site http://www.perldoc.com for more!

Graciliano M. P.
"The creativity is the expression of the liberty".