I don't see a problem with your code. I tried it on my machine and it worked fine. It just takes some time to read the data from disk, almost 10 seconds...

What did you do to investigate this issue?

Did you make sure, that the script really hangs at that point?

Maybe the data is read correctly and the script hangs in a loop afterwards?

Right now, it is just guessing what might be happening in the background...

Can you provide more details?

You could also try to use read or sysread to read chunk by chunk from the filehandle. I think it will take more time, but it would try to read the data in "one run"...