I'm sure there are more posts, but doing a quick search on perlmonks, I found "Reading the last line of a file in a Pure Way.". This has some examples as well as links to other posts on the same topic.
- jbWare
janitored by ybiC: Changed [http://...] link to Monastery-style [id://...] link, to avoid logging out monks with cookie set to different perlmonks domain