Hi monks

I'm having trouble with the seek command - it's returning "Illegal seek".

What I want to do is examine the first few lines of command output to determine which subroutine to call next. Then call that subroutine with the entire file.

This seems to work ok for an actual file:
seek $fh, 0, 0 or die $!;

But it doesn't work if the file handle is something like:
open my $fh, 'ls |';

I'm guessing this is working as designed but is there a clever way I can do this? Please keep in mind the output is pretty big and can sometimes be massive. I'm thinking around 100mb for an average output and even more is easily possible. (It's an XML file that I then pass the file handle to XML::Parser)

Thanks :)


In reply to Can I seek in a command's piped output? by wardy3

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