"...no way of knowing if & where my search string will be split at new line "\n"...i try to load the whole file into a string and then do a pattern match"

I'm unsure if i understood your specs right but perhaps you want to do something like this:

use strict;
use warnings;
use feature qw(say);

my $file    = q(big.txt);
my $size    = -s( $file);
my $pattern = qr((y+)(?:\n*)(y*));

open my $fh, '<', $file or die $!;
read( $fh, my $data, $size );
close $fh;

while( $data =~ m/$pattern/g ) {
  say qq($1$2);
}

__END__

# data like this: 
xyyyyyxxxx
xxxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxxyy
yyyxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxyyyy
yxxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxxxx
xxxxxyyyyy
xxxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxxxx
# small version ;-)

Desktop\monks>1129652.pl
yyyyy
yyyyy
yyyyy
yyyyy
[download]

The example runs on a 350MB file on XP 32bit with 2 GByte RAM in ~1s

Just an idea.

Regards, Karl

P.S.: If i use File::Map i get Out of Memory!

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