this is not suitbable, as the file could be 1000 lines long

1000 lines is not all that long. This should be plenty small enough to load into memory, as long as you're not on a very limited system. As a test, you can try loading up hashes with different numbers of elements, and looking to see what the memory usage is:

  perl -e 'my %hash = map {$_=>$_} 1 .. 1_000; print "done"; sleep'
  perl -e 'my %hash = map {$_=>$_} 1 .. 10_000; print "done"; sleep'
  perl -e 'my %hash = map {$_=>$_} 1 .. 100_000; print "done"; sleep'

[download]

On my system, the version that loaded 100,000 numbers used 21mb of memory. The version that loaded 1,000 numbers only used 3mb. On any modern computer, this should be a reasonable amount.

In reply to Re^3: Working with Arrays by revdiablo
in thread Working with Arrays by Anonymous Monk

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.