The issue with the above is it still reads in the file one line at a time, right?.

Wrong! Perl reads from the file in a buffer and only goes back out to disk when the buffer is empty. What <FILEHANDLE> does is read from the buffer up to the newline. I think you are falling prey to premature optimization. 

while (<INPUT>) {
    my @fields = split /\|/ , $_;
    #Do stuff with particular field
}

[download]

Cheers - L~R

Update: See this node by chromatic as he was setting me straight on the very same matter

In reply to Re: Re: Re: split and sysread() by Limbic~Region
in thread split and sysread() by relaxed137

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