in reply to Fastest way to get input from a filehandle

They should all be similar enough that it shouldn't matter. Note in particular: 

$ perl -MO=Deparse -e '$line = readline(*STDIN)'
$line = <STDIN>;
-e syntax OK

[download]
If you are really concerned about it, you should be using read() or sysread() instead.

-sauoq
"My two cents aren't worth a dime.";

In Section Seekers of Perl Wisdom