The above coed still prints the next line after using seek. am I missing something there in the seek function ?

The negative seek may not work in windows... not sure. It definitely does work on my linux box though. I don't have any windows handy or I'd test it. I did notice you didn't use "or die $!. " Most likely it would return an error result on your platform.

use strict;
use Fcntl qw(:seek);

open my $in, "filename" or die $!;

my $line = <$in>;
print "$line\n";

seek $in, (0 - length $line), SEEK_CUR or die $!;

$line = <$in>;
print "$line\n";

close $in;
[download]

It should either work or complain...