you can pretty much treat a file handle as a list of lines. Any old loop structure will do. I'm partial to foreach. The following code prints the first six lines of a file. 
open(FILE,'<some_file.txt'); 
for((<FILE>)[0..5]){
    print;
}

[download]
Now lets say your special delimiter is a weird tie fighter thing like this :o:
We can slurp every line up to and including that like so. 
open(FILE,'<some_file.txt') or die("cant open file: $!"); 
my $data;
for(<FILE>){ 
   if($_ !~ /:o:/){
       $data .= $_;
   }else{
       $data .= $_;
       last;
   }
}
close FILE;

[download]
Of course we should also check the first however many lines for the special character first to avoid slurping up the entire file if we dont find that character.

In reply to Re: Jumping out of a partially read file by thunders
in thread Jumping out of a partially read file by licking9Volts

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.