Thank you Ken! The bit that helped me understand what I was doing wrong, was 
my $z = IO::Uncompress::Bunzip2::->new($filename);

while (<$z>) {
}

[download]
What I needed was a way to use "while (<data>)" without using the "getline()" method that seemed to be reading the data in one line at a time. My LDIF is over 15 million lines, so that was quite slow. Using your code, I get results in ~10 seconds, which is acceptable (though still a lot slower than the shell script that pipes into Perl, and I'm not sure why that is). Thanks to you and Roboticus for steering me in the right direction. 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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