in reply to doing a search and replace on a large file

That's a one-liner, provided your pattern is reasonably small. You don't need to open filehandles if you use perl's command line options and the shell to your advantage:

perl -lne 'print if /pattern here/' old_file.txt > new_file.txt

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: () { :|:& };:

Note: All code is untested, unless otherwise stated

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Re: Re: doing a search and replace on a large file
by eXile (Priest) on Apr 14, 2004 at 14:01 UTC
    Or, if you want to overwrite the file use the '-i' cmdline option for in-place editting: 
    perl -pi -e's/pattern here//g' file

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    Update: reread question, you don't want to overwrite the file, so you don't want this.
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