Or better yet, using the safer syntax options available in 5.6 and later: 
my $lastline = do {
    open my $pipe, '-|', tail => -1, $file
        or die "Can't spawn tail: $!\n";
    <$pipe>;
};
print $lastline;

[download]

Interesting. Could you please point me to the documentation of this feature? I took a look around perldoc and couldn't find it, so I am surely searching the wrong way

Thanks in advance

Ciao!
--bronto

The very nature of Perl to be like natural language--inconsistant and full of dwim and special cases--makes it impossible to know it all without simply memorizing the documentation (which is not complete or totally correct anyway).
--John M. Dlugosz

In reply to Re^3: Read Last Line of A File Only by bronto
in thread Read Last Line of A File Only by Anonymous Monk

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