It's actually slower and more memory intensive than any of the other solutions. Tie::File internally keeps a list of byte offsets for all the lines, and it needs lot of additional overhead that is supposed to optimize writes which you never make any use of.

Your code also doesn't get the edge cases right: if there's a match within less than $context lines of the previous, it will be missed.

You gave me an idea with regards to memory consumption, though:

#!/usr/bin/perl 
use strict;
use warnings;
use Fcntl qw( :seek );

my $rx = qr/c9391b56-b174-441b-921c-7d63/;
my $to_print = 0;
my $context = 10;
my @offs = ( 0 ) x ( 1 + $context );

while(<>) {
    my $context_start = shift @offs;
    my $here = tell ARGV;
    push @offs, $here;
    if( /$rx/ ) {
        if( not $to_print ) {
            my $length = $here - $context_start;
            seek ARGV, $context_start, SEEK_SET;
            read ARGV, $_, $length;
        }
        $to_print = 1 + $context;
    }
    --$to_print, print if $to_print;
}

[download]

This only needs to keep $context offsets in memory.

Update: fixed bugs. It was ( 0 ) x $context which gave one too few lines of before-context and $here - $context_start + length which of course ate too much input — but that wasn't obvious with my test data. Oopsie.

Makeshifts last the longest.

In reply to Re^2: grab 'n' lines from a file above and below a /match/ by Aristotle
in thread grab 'n' lines from a file above and below a /match/ by barathbr

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