Thanks Roboticus. I think I might have been unclear - what I want to avoid is reading line-per-line, as my code is very slow. I assume that's because of the while (my $buff = $z->getline()) loop, but feel free to correct me on this. Using this structure, my program takes a solid minute to run, whereas the shell script that does the same thing completes in a second or two. Maybe I could call bzcat from the system, and store its output in a variable? But I'm still not sure how to use while (<>) inside a full Perl program, when I'm not reading in from a pipe. Cheers, JW.

In reply to Re^2: Searching large files a block at a time by JediWombat
in thread Searching large files a block at a time by JediWombat

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