Is there anything sensible I can do to speed this up?

Stop reading the same file over and over again. Maybe something like this can help you (untested): 

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;
use Bio::SeqIO;
use Data::Dumper;
my %seq_id;
open HEADER , "<FASTA.headers" or die $!;
while (<HEADER>){
    chomp $_;
    my $fasta_id = $_;
    $fasta_id =~ s/_.*//g ;
    $seq_id{$fasta_id} => $_;
}

my $infile = $ARGV[0] || die ("Please give me an input fasta file\n");
my $inseq = new Bio::SeqIO(-format => 'fasta',
    -file => $infile);
while (my $seq_obj = $inseq->next_seq ) {
    my $id = $seq_obj->id ;
    chomp $id;
    my $seq = $seq_obj->seq ;
    if (exists ($seq_id{$id})) {
        print ">";
        print $seq_id{$fasta_id};
        print "\n".$seq."\n";
    }
}

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Perl 6 - second systems done right

In reply to Re: renaming 1000's of FASTA files by moritz
in thread renaming 1000's of FASTA files by garyboyd

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