let us say that I have a file that is very big... let us say that it is larger than the amount of ram on the box i am working on. i have to process each and every single line, now the typical way to do this is in a
while (<INFILE>) {
    ... do stuff here ...
}

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block. now, as we all know (thanks to the von neuman bottleneck) disk IO is going to be the slowest part of this process, and i have to do this to well over 22 million lines, so i can't just slurp it all into one massive mega scalar. so, my question is, in perl is there a way of saying: "read the next 10,000 lines in one shot and put them in this array" i mean, i want to read a large amount of lines, put them into memory, and then do something like: "write the entire contents of this array in one shot" am I dreaming here? is this even possible? help me out here!

In reply to read X number of lines? by eduardo

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