in reply to perl's ability to handle LARGE files
Can you do this? Yes.
Should you? Maybe not. Regular expressions are very powerful. So powerful that they can bite you in nasty ways unless you *really* understand what you're asking for.
Judging from your question, I'd suggest you shy away from regex for this volume of data, and maybe write non-regex code to get the job done. For the tip of the iceberg, SuperSearch on "regex performance" and do some reading...
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