Thanks for the replies. I tried replying when last week, but the website just times out.

I also seriously question the wisdom, and the necessity, of buffering 
+“from 1K to 1 million lines” in memory. 


“Why is {the virtual} memory {paging file} superior to the file that y
+ou are already reading?” 

Also:   is this logfile a file of a well-known format, such as an Apac
+he server log, for which a suitable CPAN module already exists?   Mig
+ht you, quite without intending to do so, be “doing a thing already d
+one?”   Aye, ’tis dreadfully easy to do...
[download]

It is a log generated by a machine every time it does an action. It is a standard english text file, but unique in the sense of the text sequences it creates. If there is a better way then doing an OPEN on the file and reading the contents to a Array then I am ears. I need to be able to read each line of the file to look for certain sequences in each of those lines. In a file that has say 100,000 lines, it processes the array in like 8 seconds....so I'm not longing for performance just yet.