Thanks for the quick reply. I had tried different combinations of memory and cache options. Actually it eventually does return after about 5 minutes so it's not hung, just slow. I thought I would avoid reading the entire file into memory by using this module(wrong). I am trying to display a 1000 lines or so at a time in a Tk ROText widget and I thought this tie could work. I'll go back to while ( <FH> ) and tells and seeks and see if that gives me better performance.