Excellent points! Several people have pointed out very egregious logic errors in the initial code. Several of them are not errors in the sense that I know the specifics of the files I am using (no blank lines, no '\n' at the end of the file).

I really like blogans comment. Does <$fh> hit the disk each time, or is it reading from a cached block? Does anyone know?

I guess my initial point was flawed for the general case, but I can reformulate it to a better, stronger statement:

If you know certain aspects of the files you are reading (e.g. average line size, whether there are blanks in the file, etc) you could implement a bare-bones, lightning-fast read method that passes up the traditional <$fh>. But for a basic, system-independent file-reader, <$fh> is a strong contender.

Anyone agree?

In reply to Re: Re: Why use <$fh> at all? by cluka
in thread Why use <$fh> at all? by cluka

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