Am I allowed to seek STDIO when input is coming from a pipe?

My Perl script is called as follows from the UNIX shell:
   cat files.* | script.pl

What script.pl does is look at the first line of each file and call the appropriate subroutine to process that file. The problem is that the subroutine should get the file whole, not with the first line missing (and there are reasons why the subroutines should not be rewritten to accomodate a file with the first line missing). So I would like script.pl to 'rewind' back to the beginning of the file before calling the subroutine.

Better yet, if there were some way that script.pl could 'peek' at the first line without removing it from the input stream.

In reply to seeking piped STDIO by timurFriedman

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