You might want to considered changing your input loop to look something like this.

# tell perl to make the input record separator the character with hex 
+value '0c'
$/ = pack('c',0x0c);

while(<IN>) {
        my @temp = split(/\n/,$_);

        # rest of processing
}
[download]

This would save you the byte by byte read and the string concatination for every record. Should be quite a bit faster.

/\/\averick