Other than reading for a very long length (beyond the length that a file could ever be) what is the best way to read in a file. In my case the file could be anywhere upto around 1-5 meg big!

This works, but is obviously not great:-
    my $rec;
    sysopen(DF, "test.txt", O_RDONLY);
    sysread DF, $rec, 26214400;    #25meg
    close DF;

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One further question, if that variable ($rec) has thousands of records which end in CR, what's the best way to split it up into an array (retaining the carriage returns)? ie: Anything better than simply doing this after the read?

    foreach(split("\n",$rec)){push(@array,"$_\n";)}
    $rec='';    # Release memory

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Could it be cleverly combined into the read itself therefore meaning you don't have to use $rec and @array, and instead you could read it (ready split) straight into @array?

In reply to How can you sysread an entire file? by NeilF

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