Just wanted to take a second to say thanks. I mean the reason the seeker section is here to to help and be helped, but I always find perlmonks to be a breath of fresh air in terms on the online community.

With the help above I managed to get my sort of data into relvant sets down from around 35-40 seconds to around 18-22 seconds. Which isnt too shabby for about 1 million lines per file
Also I managed to go from >= 240 seconds total processing per file to <= 200 seconds per file. Which isnt huge, but it adds up, and some files were taking over 400 seconds to process so there it really helped.

Just wanted to say thanks :)

If anyone expresses intrest I can always slap the new code up on my scratchpad, just msg me.

/* And the Creator, against his better judgement, wrote man.c */