while (<FILE>) is fine, just make sure it's not for (<FILE>) which _would_ load the file into memory, but otherwise seem mostly identical to while.

It's unlikly to be significant for parsing logfiles, but sometimes it's not optimal to go line by line, since this increases i/o actions, which in general are slow. On the other hand slurping the WHOLE file into memory will require lots of ram. You can strike a compromise by using reads of maybe half a megabyte (I don't know whats optimal, but that seems sensiblish to me :) you can process the file in larger chunks with more infrequent disk access, so a good change of a faster runtime. However this will make it marginally more complicated to write.

In reply to Re: open, file handles and memory by repson
in thread open, file handles and memory by Viking

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