Instead of slurping everything at once, just read the handle four times. Then you can deal with multi-gigabyte phonebooks.

while (my ($name,$address,$phone,$fax) = (<FILE>, <FILE>, <FILE>, <FIL
+E>)) {
    #work with named vars (don't forget chomp)
}
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Update: just did a little test, and it does one iteration and stops. Hm.

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