Hi, Question: Can I have perl automatically buffer/store some amount of input from a gzip pipe so that I can "rewind" some small amount using tell then seek? Alternately, can I "push" a few lines back into the pipe? Hoping not to have to completely restructure my code to read zipped files. I have large < 5G input files, so I want to read only one-pass with small rewinds. I need to pre-fetch some keywords in each section to properly build a data structure. The position of the keywords can be anywhere within the section. AT this size reading the zipped version of a file is greatly preferred. 

EX:
...
open(LIBIN, "gunzip -c $read_file |") or die "\nERROR: ...";
...
while($line = <LIBIN>) {
  $self->{LINENUMBER}++;
  $file_line_location{$self->{LINENUMBER}} = tell LIBIN;
.....
   # Return to the start of a section after pre-parsing
   seek  LIBIN , $file_line_location{$section_reentry_line}, 0;
....
}

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Suggestions?

In reply to buffering zipped pipes by Anonymous Monk

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