Also, if you don't know how many lines to skip but you *do* know what the first line-of-interest starts with, you can say something like (untested):

my $good_start = 0;
while (<FILE>) {
    next unless (($good_start) || (/^start-of-data pattern/);
    $good_start = 1;

    # do things with the interesting lines
}
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