As best as I can tell, Perl's built-in grep command does not look inside an unopened file for you.
But if that is what you want to do, why not use grep and the backtick operator? It is even possible that Grep may avoid scanning in a whole file if it knows that a pattern has failed halfway through.
Even if grep doesn't exist on a Windows system you can always use the GNU port of grep which is available here. |