The issue is that Perl's internal representation of a file is 32-bit. So when Perl tries to seek to a particular location of a very large file, well Perl doesn't understand what position 5_003_904_123 is.

There are two solutions. One is to compile a new version of Perl that does understand how to handle large files. The other is to keep Perl from trying to seek. The easiest way to do the other is for Perl to read from a pipe, not a filehandle. That can be done by writing your script so that it reads from STDIN, or by converting your opens so that they look kind of like this: 

open(FILE, "cat $file |") or die "Cannot cat '$file': $!";

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In reply to Re (tilly) 1: processing large files by tilly
in thread processing large files by Anonymous Monk

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