Hi, I seem to be making a mess of using sysread. I haven't been using perl long so I thought I'd write a simple routine which manipulates a file. The file is tab delimited with 8 columns 
field1 field2 field3 field4 field5 field6 field7 field8

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field6 and field7 are dates with this format. e.g. 
Aug 11 2010 1:40PM

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All I want to do is to get this file into an array so I can manipulate it. I tried doing this 
local *IN;
open(IN, "/var/tmp/myfile.dat") or die "Can't read /var/tmp/myfile.dat
+: $! \n";

binmode(IN);

my $buf_e = '';
my $buf_d = '';

my $BLOCK_SIZE = 8192;
my @recs;

# Shove the contents of file into an array

while (sysread(IN, $buf_e, $BLOCK_SIZE, length($buf_e))) {

   push(@recs, [ $1, $2, $3, $4, $5, $6, $7, $8 ])
      while ($buf_d =~ s/^(\S+)\t+(\S+)\t+(\S+)\t+(\S+)\t+(\S+)\t+(\S+
+)\t+(\S+)\t+(\S+)\n//s);

}

close(IN);

print @recs;

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But it's not working. No output is produced and I can't figure out why. Any help would be gratefully received

In reply to sysread failure by Anonymous Monk

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