I am guessing one of the reasons that you used seek and tell, is prpobably memory concern.

Still I suggest you to use Tie::File as Fletch already suggested. I read its entire source code before, and the author of that module actually used memory in a really wise way.

To use it, just do something like:

use Tie::File;

my $self = tie @array, "Tie::File", "test.pl";
[download]

The first thing pop up in your mind might be whether the whole file would be loaded into that array (and I can see that you are only interested in a small piece of the file at any given moment). The answer is NO. The array size is not only well controlled, but also configurable.