Thanks a million for your input. I actually thought the regular expression to trim spaces might be a culprit, but I did not know that unpack would automatically trim trailing spaces. All the data I'm splitting is character data, so A should work just fine (if I understand unpack correctly.) :) I do have to ask, though, does unkpack trim leading spaces? That could be a problem, since some of the data in the fields is positional.

Put your speculation to rest...accumulating the records into a string and then writing in bulk does indeed backfire. It slows the process down...not much, but it does impact it negatively.

I was fairly certain Perl is optimized to buffer output efficiently, but I'm testing with 500K records and I need to really use this script on millions of records...so I want to get the time down as much as possible. :)

Thanks again for all the suggestions...I'll keep you posted as I implement your suggestions. :)

--Larry

In reply to Re: Re: Re: Re: What's the most efficient way to write out many lines of data? by Anonymous Monk
in thread What's the most efficient way to write out many lines of data? by Anonymous Monk

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