Thanks for your input, I thought that I'd be able to save some time with running over 50 (turns out to be 93)process against a 100 Mb file (just under a million lines).
But you guys think the precompiled regex and a loop is a better solution so I'll go that way. 'dmmiller2k' likes how simple it is and so do I.
now,... is it better to load the file into an array (@ARGV = qw(file.txt);) or to just go through it line by line