We have had similar problem, we used code mentioned below 
/usr/bin/perl -w 
use strict;

my @a; 

while ( (@a) = map { (scalar(<>) or ()) } (0..4) ) {
     print join("|", @a);
}

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In reply to Re: Reading files n lines a time by Anonymous Monk
in thread Reading files n lines a time by naturalsciences

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