Perl alone won't help you at all in understanding how things work out. In particular the Mmap module that betterworld suggested is useful but not without knowing how it works. If you're serious about this I suggest you take the APUE book , flip to page 487 and read up on how mmap actually works(pages 487 and 488). Perl is not always the best context to learn some ideas,in this case it is just a wrapper around a concept which does not belong to it.