using open() is a quick easy way of doing it. But working with external files slows down any script. I would suggest using backticks, and then parsing out the data you want using regex and/or split. I had a script which was taking 15 minutes to run when it was using external files. I optimized it using split -- and now it only takes 8 minutes. But as the perl slogan goes: There is more than one way to do it.