Urk! What is that seek doing in there? You already have the line in $data and the start point in $pos. (split /\t/,substr $data, $pos)[0,3] ought do the job. It may be faster to constrain split to just finding the first 4 elements, but I'd have to benchmark that.

DWIM is Perl's answer to Gödel

In reply to Re^3: Optimising a search of several thousand files by GrandFather
in thread Optimising a search of several thousand files by McDarren

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