Data::Dumper, Storable and friends are not always the right answer. Yes, he knows that he can do it that way, but he would prefer not to for performance reasons.

That is a perfectly legitimate question. Algorithmically it is really stupid to have to parse a potentially large data file when you only want one item out of it. While my gut response is to not worry about performance, that is something which can easily become a bottleneck, and it is good to have some knowledge of how to handle the situation if it does become a problem and you do not have a structure which is suited to an RDBMS.

However your rudeness is another story entirely...