What was your attempt with read() ? It takes a length to read, so you can read chunks at a time .. but i think you have to handle the line breaks yourself ...

Update: I started an attempt with read(), but hit a snag .. i think i need to restart my attempt and read 1 char at a time.. 
use strict;
use warnings;
use Data::Dumper;
use constant MAX_LINE_LENGTH => 25;

my $file = '/etc/hosts';
my @lines;
my $prev_line = '';
while( !eof DATA ){
  my $line;
  read DATA, $line, MAX_LINE_LENGTH;

  push @lines, $line;
}
print Dumper \@lines;


__DATA__
this is a line aqwewqe
short
shrt
short2
short3
this is a line asdas
this is a another very ling line lkjkdsa to skip qweqweqwewqewqewqeqwe
this is a line asdasd
this is a line lkjqwe
this is a very ling line lkjkdsa to skip qweqweqwewqewqewqeqwe
this is a line ad as

[download]


Update2: Not overly impressive coding, but i think this works (i created a long ~7.8M line with for f in `seq 1 1000000` ; do echo -n "blahblahblah" >> /tmp/longline ; done in bash and stuck it in the DATA section and it seemed to work): 
use strict;
use warnings;
use Data::Dumper;
use constant MAX_LINE_LENGTH => 25;

my $file = '/etc/hosts';
my @lines;
my $line = '';
while( !eof DATA ){
  my $c;
  read DATA, $c, 1;
  if( length($line) > MAX_LINE_LENGTH ){
    $line = '' if $c eq "\n";
    next;
  }
  if( $c eq "\n" ){
    push @lines, $line;
    $line = '';
    next;
  }
  $line .= $c;
}
print Dumper \@lines;

__DATA__
this is a line aqwewqe
short
shrt
short2
short3
this is a line asdas
this is a another very ling line lkjkdsa to skip qweqweqwewqewqewqeqwe
this is a line asdasd
this is a line lkjqwe
this is a very ling line lkjkdsa to skip qweqweqwewqewqewqeqwe
this is a line ad as

[download]

In reply to Re: Reading files, skipping very long lines... by davidrw
in thread Reading files, skipping very long lines... by Excalibor

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