I was thinking that by using a single string rather than an array, you can avoid the explicit looping, making your code clearer. Since you also mentioned having a memory leak, I thought that a single string would fragment memory much less than a bazillion smaller strings. That might make it easier for perl to reuse the memory and/or recognize what can be freed

Other than that, it's not much different at all.

Of course, since you're rereading the same file repeatedly, I think that Joost's suggestion is my favorite so far. Then, while looking up File::Tail, I saw File::Tail::App, which is pretty cool because it does much of the grunt work for you.

--roboticus