There is no "peek", per se. I see two options for you - neither of which is probably very appealing.

The easiest way is to create a subclass of IO::File that would cache the next line for you. So, it would always be a line ahead of where you are. Then, you would just treat that object as your file and add a call to $file->peek whenever you needed to peek at the next line.

The better way, in my humble opinion, is to rewrite your main loop as such:

1. Read the line.
2. See if it's part of the same record or not.
   1. If it isn't, then deal with the end of the record (pushing it onto a global variable or whatever)
   2. Clear the temporary variables used for building a given record
3. Handle the line as if the above handling wasn't there.