In the Perl Cookbook recipe 3.9 'High-Resolution Timers' looks pretty useful for timing code - it uses the Time::HiRes module which comes standard in Perl 5.8: 
  use Time::HiRes qw(gettimeofday);
  $t0 = gettimeofday;

  ### your code here ###

  $t1 = gettimeofday;
  $elapsed = $t1 - $t0;
  # elapsed is a floating point value, representing the
  # number of seconds between $t0 and $t1

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then do the same thing for the *other* way, and see which one takes the least amount of time.

In reply to Re: Re: Opening file and checking for data by hmerrill
in thread Opening file and checking for data by Anonymous Monk

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