Hi. Sorry, there was no try on my part, it was just begginers question if there is a command telling perl to start reading from the end of the file (and to my surprise googling didnt help). The answers below are appreciated (unfortunately i dont have mac). I found yet another package File::ReadBackwards and whe trying I bumped into a surprising problem: when I read xml file it is broken into individual letters instead of lines. And when I tried standard procedure

open(DATAFILE, $file);
while (defined ($line = <DATAFILE>)) {
    chomp $line; 
    print $line                 
}
close(DATAFILE);
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and got the same letter soup. What is wrong? I tried to redefine end of line by setting local $/ as "something at the beggining of the file" and something not in the file but it doesnt helped (and did similar in File::ReadBackwards->new( $filename_in,"something as above" ))). Please help.