I suggest you try it.

I have done so. We have some large fixed-record-length extracts lying around, record length about 4 KB. The size of file.txt was 1,985,184 KB when I started and 1,985,180 KB when the shift was done. It took three minutes.

It's true our fixed-length records are delivered to us with a newline at the end of each record. I always thought that was for the convenience of human readers with text editors, but it also enables Tie::File.

As the manpage says, Tie::File does not support fixed-width records unless of course they end in a record separator. Whether the records in the original question have newlines at the end, only sparkle can tell us.

In reply to Re^3: Removing the first record in a file containing fixed records by Narveson
in thread Removing the first record in a file containing fixed records by sparkle

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