To follow up on what brother Fletch said, sysread is really only something you'll need to use when munging a binary file. For any line-oriented file, just open the file and read it with open and the diamond operator while(<>){ .. }. And then close it, of course.

And don't worry that you have to read 8K blocks to get decent throughput -- the part of Perl that reads lines from files has had (from what I've heard) a great deal of attention paid to it over the last twenty or so years, and is probably about as fast as it could possibly be.

Also, seeing a repeated pattern in a regular expression should be a sign that there's probably a better way. Again, brother Fletch has suggested split. Try it -- I think you'll like it.

Alex / talexb / Toronto

"Groklaw is the open-source mentality applied to legal research" ~ Linus Torvalds

In reply to Re: sysread failure by talexb
in thread sysread failure by Anonymous Monk

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