Zaxo,
This is very similar to the idea I had. I discovered that compiling the offsets using DBM::Deep was extremely slow, but was fast for subsequent runs. This also has the advantage of not requiring the dictionary file to be sorted. 
#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use DBM::Deep;

open(my $dict, '<', 'words.raw') or die "Unable to open 'words.raw' fo
+r reading: $!";

my $db = DBM::Deep->new("offsets.db");
build_db($db, $dict) if ! scalar keys %$db;

for my $char ('a' .. 'z') {
    for (1 .. 100) {
        print get_rand_word($db, $char, $dict);
    }
}

sub build_db {
    my ($db, $dict) = @_;
    my $pos = tell $dict;
    while ( <$dict> ) {
        my $char = substr($_, 0, 1);
        push @{$db->{$char}}, $pos;
        $pos = tell $dict;
    }
}

sub get_rand_word {
    my ($db, $char, $dict) = @_;
    my $offset = $db->{$char}[rand @{$db->{$char}}];
    seek $dict, $offset, 0;
    my $word = <$dict>;
    return $word;
}

[download]
Other options include Storable and DBD::SQLite if a real RDBMS isn't available.

Cheers - L~R

In reply to Re^2: improving the efficiency of a script by Limbic~Region
in thread improving the efficiency of a script by sulfericacid

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