It would be simpler to use the buffered operations for this. That gives you automatic record seperator detection:

my $string
{
    local $/ = "\n";
    open my $fle, '<', $filepath or die $!;
    seek $fle, $offset, 0 or die $!;
    $string = <$fle>;
    close $fle or die $!;
}
[download]

You could position without seek by first reading a dummy line with local $/ = \$offset;, but that is unnecessarily opaque.

After Compline,
Zaxo