Thanks for the update, that does help clarify your post.

After doing some research and giving the issue some thought, I'd say your way is probably more efficient in most cases. The reason is that it doesn't need to stat the file (-s $file in my example).

The only area I see in which my way would be superior is if you didn't want to read the entire file, but instead only X bytes from it. As you know, the desired byte count is the third parameter passed to the "read" function.

I haven't done any benchmarking, this is just my semi-educated guess.

Update: After running a benchmark, it appears my way is substantially faster! See below, the numbers are seconds taken to execute 1000 loops of the code. See Speed reading (files). 
using read
0.780380964279175
0.774328947067261
0.926505088806152
0.798418998718262
0.798079967498779
0.841788053512573

traditional slurp
1.34281802177429
1.325679063797
1.28992795944214
1.29997110366821
1.28340101242065
1.28570604324341

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In reply to Re^5: file reading issues by kwaping
in thread file reading issues by mojobozo

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